A guest post

In the throes of wedding planning, hosting family and friends from out of down, and soaking up some precious time with my own family and friends, I didn't have the heart to blog last week. And I knew that I certainly wouldn't have the heart for it on my honeymoon (which is happening right now)! Instead, I decided to share this space with a much more experienced blogger, Stephanie Wilson. Stephanie recently married Carl, and though their story is different than Stephen's and my story, it holds enough similarities that I always end up thinking, Yeah...I know how that feels. 

I asked Stephanie to write a guest post on Peach Lemonade for me so it wouldn't be too empty here. I wanted her to share her own experience with hard transitions during joyful seasons, something that's as much for me as it is for all of you. I hope you'll enjoy this piece of her story, and I can't wait to share more of mine when I get back.

The thing about transitions is we often think they’ll happen one at a time. In fact, we try to plan them that way. We don’t go for a new job when we’re planning a wedding, we don’t try to get pregnant at the same time we’re moving. We don’t buy a house when the rest of life feels upside down, “One thing at a time,” we tell ourselves.

But the truth about transitions is it rarely happens this way. Life isn’t a ball machine at the tennis courts, steadily lobbing balls at us one at a time.

Instead, life feels like a thousand ball machines—felt, green transition flying at us from all corners. There’s no break, no chance to catch your breath, no time to even hit them back.

When it rains, it pours, and that’s how it feels with transition. Changes don’t come one at a time, they seem to happen all at once with more chaos than our perfectly laid plans know what to do with.

At least this is how it happened for me.

Carl and I had steady jobs when we got engaged. We’d been working at the same place, had a routine, had roommates and nice places to live, it seemed to be the perfect time for the transition towards marriage.

We started planning our wedding, it was slightly stressful but also wonderful, and we began to dream for the life that was unfolding in front of us.

Maybe we’d move to a new state in a few years, maybe we’d apply for new jobs in awhile, but not today. Today was for marriage and we were going to keep everything around us as steady as possible in the meantime.

But as you can imagine, that’s not what happened at all.

On a random Thursday just three months before our wedding, Carl and I got called into a small office with two serious looking executives staring back at us.

Five minutes later we walked out of the office each holding a severance check. The company hadn’t budgeted well, they were making cuts, we no longer had jobs, “effective immediately.”

We stood outside for a long time in a tight hug. “It’s going to be okay,” Carl whispered into my ear, and I believed him. I just didn’t know how it would all be okay.  

The next three months were chaos. We were surrounded by lists: the guest list for our wedding, lists of cities we could move to, places where we’d applied for jobs, places where we’d been rejected, apartments we’d looked into, and options for what we were going to do if worse came to worst, along with our wedding budget, and a long list of things we still had to take care of.

Needless to say, this was more transition than we’d bargained for.

But it wasn’t just the physical transition that made it so gut-wrenching. It was the emotional toll the change took on us. I thought I’d have time to get used to becoming a wife, time to soak in all of the newness as it trickled in bit by bit. But I didn’t have that luxury. It was go-time. We were on. Life had to be attended to and it couldn’t wait for me to process.

So we did what any normal person would do. We put our heads down and got to work. We cried, or at least I did, and we worried. We wished life had dealt us a different hand, but we pressed on.

And something amazing happened in the pressing on.

We saw things in ourselves, in each other, and in God that we never would have seen otherwise.

We were so out of control in the midst of the circumstances that we learned a lot about ourselves. We learned that when bad things happen, I want to stop and cry about them for a while, and Carl wants to fix them. We learned how to be kind to each other, and how to love one another in the midst of a storm. We learned how to weather the storm together—how he could protect me and I could protect him right back. We learned that we’re tougher than we thought we were, and that we can handle more than we thought we could. And most of all, we learned that God really comes through in a pinch.

With two weeks to spare I got a job, Carl met the guy who’s now his business partner, we found an apartment, we moved to Nashville, we finished wedding plans, and we began to get settled into a new life that looked totally different from the one we’d dreamed of just a few months before.

We arrived at our wedding battered and exhausted, but we arrived stronger, and better, and more in love somehow. Because we’d learned that even when the whole world falls apart, we have each other, and that God has both of us, and that’s all we need.

They weren’t fun lessons to learn necessarily, but I wouldn't take back a single one. Without those lessons, and without that transition, we wouldn’t know each other like we do now, and we wouldn’t know God’s faithfulness the way we do now too. If I could go back, I wouldn't make that season easier, because then we’d lose the sweetness we gained from surviving.