<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3148400833_4303209868.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-425" title="3148400833_4303209868" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3148400833_4303209868.jpg" alt="" width="547" height="364" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 300px;">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/ajawin/">Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic</a></h5>
<strong>I should know by now that when my life shifts in a way that seems bad, I should prepare myself for something good.</strong>

That's a hard pattern to trust and embrace, though, no matter how many times I've seen it take hold in my life. And I've seen it many times: When I moved from Michigan to Central Illinois. When I got divorced. When I left my church. When my first post-divorce relationship fell apart. When I lost my biggest freelance client.

In all of those cases, my life changed significantly, for the better. <strong>Sometimes the winds of change arrived in short order, like a gust of fresh air. Other times I spent much longer in what felt like a stagnant space of worry, heartache and despair before I felt the breeze of something new.</strong> But each time something good has happened.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about where I was with my work two years ago. That was the summer I suddenly lost my primary client, who was responsible for well over half of my paid writing projects. I loved the work. It paid well and was consistent. And somehow I thought it would just always be there, until the day I got the news that they were planning to hire someone locally, full time. The amount of writing they needed had reached that tipping point, where it made more financial sense to hire someone than to pay freelance rates.

I was devastated. Not only did I really enjoy the work and the people, but Jason and I were about a month away from our wedding and honeymoon to Greece. In other words, we were a month away from a lot of out-of-the-ordinary expenses and debt. (When you get married a second time, you don't ask your parents to help out.)

There wasn't much we could do. We managed to cut some costs on the wedding and reception, then we set our financial worries aside and went ahead and fully enjoyed every moment of our honeymoon, as planned. We arrived home to credit card bills and, for me, empty days of almost no client work.
<h4>What does God have to do with this?</h4>
You might be wondering why this post is categorized under "Belief, doubt and hope." <strong>Essentially, this is a post about trust and faith, and God's work in my life.</strong> If you don't have that sort of belief in God—if you don't believe he has a plan or is helping you work through the messes that just happen because we're human—I realize this concept can seem like a stretch.

Sometimes it feels like a stretch to me, too. <strong>At each of those unhappy moments I was filled with doubt that God was there at all, or could possibly bring about anything good.</strong> But when it gets down to it, I always circle back to this bottom-of-my-soul belief that something much bigger than I can grasp, full of love and goodness, is working in and through my life.

And I have evidence:

I believe my move to Central Illinois allowed my ex and I to <strong>end a marriage</strong> that needed to end.

I believe my divorce allowed me to <strong>get in touch with who I really am</strong>, what I really want, and what I really have to offer to others.

I believe leaving my church allowed me to <strong>embrace God</strong> and my understanding of him in a completely new, very freeing way.

I believe being in my first post-divorce relationship, and then ending it, allowed me to <strong>open up to love again</strong>, and helped me sort out what matters most to me in a relationship (which ultimately led me to marry Jason).

And I believe I never would have been able to <strong>start writing this blog and my book</strong> if that client had continued its demanding freelance contract with me.

Because that's what I did with those endless work days, two summers ago. <strong>I tried to set aside my fears about money and worth and professional success, and write down the stories I needed to write. </strong>All those stories were clamoring to get out. No one was necessarily going to pay anything for them, but it didn't mater. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
<h4>Remembering the past as I look ahead</h4>
Eventually the client work picked up again, and new clients came along. I continued blogging and working on my book proposal, and was committed to leaving time and space for that, rather than filling up all my work hours with client projects, like I had before.

<strong>It's hard to remember my life without this blog—the creative outlet, the impetus to think and write, the community of readers—just like it's hard to remember my life without Jason, or my life in Michigan, or that time when God felt so far away.</strong>

Right now the freelance work is a bit slow, again, and once again I'm trying not to worry about money or societal measurements of success. <strong>Instead, I'm trying to be open to what God might be doing in my life, and what I might be doing with this time I've been given. I'm trying to be expectant of that next big gust or gentle breeze of change.</strong>