Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
-- Raymond Lindquist
Crossroads. It's where I'm at. I know you don't use a preposition at the end of a sentence, but as I like to say, TTB - too tough bad. With the impending end of my husband's current employment, I have been brought to a really pensive place today. Preoccupied is more like it, but pensive sounds better and less panicky. I know God will provide a new job for him and means for us in the meantime, but my quandary is more on a grand scale. We're at a point in our lives where we know exactly what we want to do and now we need to find a way to do it and just do it. The problem with that is I'm a little scared ****less. Pardon the ****, but it's true. I am.
Our dream is to have our own restaurant. It was originally a passion of my husband's that quickly transferred to me as well. We say this knowing fully (and I really mean fully) that it is an incredibly difficult undertaking that will more than likely take over our lives. We know it is hard work and an extremely volatile field to be in. All of that we know and... We still want to do it. In my mind, that says to me that it's exactly what we're meant to do. Our pull to this idea has been so strong and for so long that I know it could only be in God's plan for us. I'm slow on the uptake. Well, now I am. I used to not be so stubborn in seeing God's will for my life. There have been times in my life when after I've come through a really tough time, I looked back, and in retrospect was so sure that what I had thought was God's will for my life was me convincing myself that it was God's will when it really wasn't. I realize how silly that sounds. And how impossible that is.
I have taken leaps of faith in my life. For those of you who know me, leaving home at 16 to move across the world for 9 months probably seems like one of those. Nope. That was one of the easiest decisions I've ever made - just like making the decision to marry my husband. The tough part came when at 19 I went back to Italy to live on my own in a very antiquated part of the country. I was going to go to the music conservatory to sing. I was going to find a job and support myself. Yeah right. That whole idea and experience chewed me up and spit me right back out into the bottom of a big black pit. And it stung, bad. I actually convinced myself that I had simply made the wrong decision and had not followed God's will for my life. I still to this day do not fully know why God had me there at that time. But that experience has made me cautious.
Which brings me back to present day. We know we want to open a restaurant in some shape or form. We are quite certain that this is God's will for us. But actually doing this, risking financial security, employment stability, etc., to me, is terrifying. The push to think about it and do it now is obviously related to my husband losing his job at the end of this next week. Why not do it now? Studies show that, the economy being what it is now, if you have an idea for a small business, now is the time to just do it. Create your own job security. Now, all that's really left for us to do is take that first step in a leap of faith.
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