That Thing That Changes Everything

CHRISTIEN:

A casual conversation changed our life. In early June of 2017 (two weeks ago as I’m writing this), Bryan said that we should just pack up everything and buy a motorhome and go. Before we go any further, you should know that this is a long-standing dream of mine, but more on that later. Honestly, I didn’t think much of it. We’re both planners and obsessed by “what if?” We have about eight billion plans for what we’ll do when when we win the lottery, and oddly enough, that’s about the same as the odds against that happening.

Turns out though, that this wasn’t a “what if” question. It was the real deal, and now we’re two weeks in to immersing ourselves (okay, it’s mostly me, but I have a strange compulsion to research things) Pinterest pages on RV hacks, RV groups on Facebook, Craigslist and RVTrader search filters… and something else that we’d never considered.

Our Engagement Picture, 2008

Bryan just last night earned his 9 month sobriety from what they call “sexual addiction.” More on that topic later as there is a lot of controversy over that diagnosis. He attends weekly meetings at Celebrate Recovery and has just started a twelve-step program. I am learning to understand what it means to live with an “addict” and how it affects my choices and my personal freedoms. We attend a wonderful Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and we could not have been together to even plan this strange new lifestyle if it weren’t for those two organizations, and a couple of others (but more on that later). We’ve been talking for the last 6 months or so about being more involved in ministry, especially marriage and dealing with sex and porn addiction, but we just weren’t sure what that would look like.

In one of our planning/brainstorming conversations I told Bryan that it would be neat for him to travel to different Celebrate Recovery groups and speak there. His mentor loved the idea, and actually encouraged us to figure out a way to do that formally rather than just casually showing up. That sparked another idea, and we were off to talk to our pastor about what we could do within the church.

We run our own business, Cardinal Estimating, Construction & Management (the link may or may not be good as we don’t advertise a lot and getting a website up and running hasn’t been a priority. Plus, we connected our email to Microsoft Exchange and that’s a whole new world of learning. Anyway, being on the road we’ll just be focusing on the Estimating rather than the Construction Management, but regardless, we’re looking to be the tentmaking variety of ministry. We don’t need individual church, or even denominational, support in order to make this happen.

But it is happening. This blog is our first step, our declaration, if you will, that we ARE going there. I invite you to follow along, cheer us on, definitely pray for us, and certainly contact us if you don’t know where to go for help – we’ll point you in the directions that God sent us for healing.

(Please note that we are not currently affiliated with any organization listed in this post (other than our own business), we’ve benefited greatly from them and are hoping to use our ministry to steer people that direction, but we don’t speak for them, nor they for us.)