Tuesday, August 12, 2014

June Was Too Late

We had been planning for some time to move and live near my wife's family in Missouri. All the pieces but one had fallen into place. There was a wedding of a close friend that would occur at the end of June in Provo. Do we move before the wedding and travel back for it or do we wait and move afterwards? It was a hard choice.

I wanted to move earlier and just come back. I disliked the prospect of sitting on my hands for a month just waiting until we could move. But buying plane tickets or committing to drive 20 hours there and 20 hours back was no small thing. My wife thought it was much more practical to wait until after the wedding, and I knew she was right.

But I couldn't get over this strong feeling that we needed to move earlier. We talked about it many times. Once in April I said to my wife, "I feel like something terrible is going to happen in your family. Almost like somebody is going to die, but not quite as bad." Another time I said, "I just feel like June is too late." But again, it was terribly impractical, so we kept our plans for moving at the end of June.

Then near the end of May one of my wife's uncles died. He lived in Utah and her parents decided to drive out for the funeral. They offered to bring their large 12 passenger van and pick up a load of our stuff to take back to Missouri for us. It would save us a ton of money and hassle. The plan was to live without most of our stuff for the duration of June until we moved then hopefully fit what was left into our mini-van.

Striking a balance between what we needed to live for one month and what we could fit in our van was impossible. On Saturday, May 24th we decided that we would move early. We weren't taking our furniture and we only lived in a small two-bedroom apartment. We were confident we could fit everything we needed into the 12-passenger van with some overflow into our mini-van. We left Utah on the 28th and arrived in Missouri late on the 29th.

In the morning of Saturday, May 31st, the last day of May, just 36 hours after arriving in Missouri, my 11-year-old brother-in-law was involved in a serious accident. He was partially crushed by a backhoe. He sustained 13 broken ribs and a punctured lung.

My wife and I quickly remembered the conversations we had while deciding when to move. "Something terrible is going to happen." "June is too late."

We wish that we had listened to the gentle prompting about moving in May, but we're grateful that God found a way to get us to Missouri on time anyways. We marvel at the simple yet profound nature of the knowledge he shared with us. June was too late.



My brother-in-law has recovered well. He doesn't have his full strength back yet, but for weeks he's been running, wrestling, working, swinging on ropes, and all sorts of other things that farm boys do. His rapid recovery was quite miraculous too.

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