Spiritual Misfit, Week 2: My Excel Spreadsheet Life

This post was supposed to go up last week, but I found myself in the middle of a last-minute decision to have a yard sale...which is why this post went up a week late. Sorry, everyone. I will stay on track this time!

God has a sense of humor. I think it comes out a lot when we fall in love. When I met my husband, I was a nineteen year old vegetarian studying English literature and spending most of my spare time reading books or riding horses and working in the barn. He was an avid deer hunter who only read fiction when forced to - and he was already a pastor. A painfully shy girl like me wasn't exactly pastor's wife material. But God had other plans.

I thought I had it all worked out. I would finish both my bachelor's degree and my master's before settling down. I would date the love of my life for at least a year before getting engaged. We would get married, have several kids and settle down on a large farm, where I would become a writer.

I'm pretty sure God heard those plans and laughed. A lot.

I met my husband when I was nineteen and he was twenty-four. We were friends - okay, actually, he was my pastor and we became friends during that time - for a year. Then he moved to another church an hour away, and my world crumbled. Suddenly I realized that my feelings were not longer just about friendship. He obviously felt the same way, because three weeks after he moved, he called and asked me for our first date. Less than a month after our first date, I had an engagement ring on my finger, and three months later, I became a pastor's wife.

It was a rude awakening. Some moments were funny...like the time I said "I'll pass" when asked to pray. (I'll share that story when I guest post on Michelle's blog later this summer.) Some were painful...let's just say that pastor's wives aren't always treated by the Golden Rule. Suddenly the girl who spent almost 20 years living in the same house, the girl who treasured stability and routine, moved three times in less than two years. We would go on to move four more times in the next five years - sometimes across town, sometimes across the state, and finally out of state.

As Michelle says, "I have liked a precisely ordered universe. I crave order and structure...and have an unflagging zest for control." Suddenly I knew that I wasn't in control of anything - and I think that was God's plan all along. He doesn't like to leave us in our comfort zones. Looking back, I can see that He had a perfect plan all along...I just wish I'd realized that sooner!

What has God done to take you out of your comfort zone?