One year ago today, I was on the road, with my family, to Memphis, Tennessee. It had been a grueling past week, loading a moving truck and saying goodbye to the dearest place and people I have ever known. I'd never wanted to leave Texas or my friends and family there, but circumstances had made staying an impossibility. I'd long struggled with the reality that I would be moving again and I was feeling rather hopeless. After all, this time was different from all the other times I had moved. I was nineteen, in the middle of college, and well established in a home town with all the friends I'd ever needed. I wasn't ready to start over and it wouldn't be as easy as it had been when I was a kid and could just join a new Sunday school class and pick up with whomever happened to be coloring next to me. I would have to make the effort to plant new roots, and I was completely unmotivated to do that.
We got to Memphis and all my plans fell apart. The apartment that my sister and I were supposed to rent fell through so we decided to live with our parents until we could find a new one...that was until my sister realized that she needed to move back to Texas because the school in Memphis didn't have the program she thought they did. Long story short, nothing was going according to plan and I was too depressed to care. I didn't want to live in Memphis.
The first semester was hard. There's no other way to put it, really. I missed my friends, my grandparents, my church, and everything about Denton. I was confused as to what God was doing with my life because the only light I could see at the end of the tunnel was "finish school and get back to Texas." It was a doable goal to be sure, but why in the world did I have to spend the next two years in Memphis when I had been so convinced that I was supposed to stay in Denton? And what kind of life would that be, to be so focused on leaving Memphis and miserable with homesickness? I knew there had to be a reason that I came to Memphis and four words that my pastor had spoken in a sermon, not too long before I left, kept returning to mind: bloom where you're planted.
I desperately wanted to do that, but I didn't know how to even begin. I'd found a church with a good college program and good people. The only peace I found was there, among people who I barely knew but who were all kind and supportive. I'd met a couple nice people in some of my classes who I could hang out with, but at the end of the day I would come home and the feelings of homesickness and purposelessness returned. After a while of trying to find a reason for all of it, I sort of gave in. I gave into the fact that I might never know why God had uprooted me and brought me to this new place. One of my good friends had warned me that I may never know and as I realized she was right, something amazing happened. I wouldn't realize just how amazing until later, but this is what happened.
I was continuing on in my routine of class, home, Bible study on Thursday night, class, home, church on Sunday morning, Skype with a friend, etc. It was late November and the college group at church began to talk about a finals week ministry event that basically fed studying college students breakfast and coffee for free on the last few nights before finals. At the time, I didn't know why I was so drawn to volunteer, so interested in helping out. But I signed up to bake things in the church kitchen every night of the event from 7PM-2AM. I showed up with no expectations. That week, during that event, was where I met this man.
Ben and I look back on this night so often. We are continually amazed at how unlikely our meeting was. From the moment I found out I was moving I did everything I could to try to stay in Texas. He's lived in Memphis his whole life and I wanted nothing to do with it. Even that night, he says that he never planned to be at the church, but a buddy of his insisted that they go. I was supposed to be across the hall in the kitchen but I got moved to the coffee bar where he happened to be. It is amazing to me how very obvious God's hand is/was in the whole thing.
A year ago today, as I laid my head down on an air mattress in an empty room, I had no clue what God was doing. As I went to transfer student orientation the next morning, I was unaware of how He was moving. Even in my darkest hours of doubting God's plan for me, He was tinkering with the fabric of Ben's and my paths so that they would cross. Ben is not the reason I came to Memphis, but rather he is the manifestation of what I have learned
from being here. That even in the most confusing moments of life when nothing makes sense and everything seems to be topsy turvy, God still has a plan. And it is better than anything you could make up yourself.
