leaving town

Jason:

Ever have the feeling that your feelings in a given moment are not quite equal to what the moment demands? As if reality has not really set in?  That happened to me the other day.  It felt much too easy to leave everything behind on Thursday to board the 1:52pm westbound train from the Lancaster Amtrak station platform with plans not to return for a good long while. I left my house, my job, my family, my friends, and my comfortable little life behind without feeling like it was a big deal. Someday, a few days, weeks, or months from now it'll hit me, but right now, it hasn’t. I know there are challenges ahead; I know that my comfort zone will most likely be blown to smithereens, but I don’t think I have realized that yet. I’m just happy to be on my way west, and am looking forward to what God has in store for us, despite leaving the little town of Lancaster with all of its comforts J.

Just Thursday while sitting at a train station in Pittsburgh while waiting on our next train to Chicago, my lovely wife and I decided to reconcile the credit card transactions from this past year to redeem the time (yes, it literally has been that bad with me in charge of the books for the last while). If you don’t know me, you might find it surprising that I don’t sit around twiddling my oversize thumbs, wondering what to do with 24 hours in a day, but instead always seem to have 101 things going on at once and with that, understandably of course (in my defense), not everything gets done. There was a certain purchase that was unclear what it had been for and what it should be categorized under. I was the offending party in the matter and try as I might, I couldn’t remember what it was I had purchased. So using my very large brain, I decided if I could remember what I did that day, then I might be able to remember what it was I purchased as well. Wow Jason, smart idea. Try as I might, even aiding myself with calendars, thinking out loud (this really helps if you haven’t ever tried it), and head banging (not very useful), I couldn’t even remember what I did on that day. I then started to wonder, how much of what I do in life is so trivial that a half a year from tomorrow it’ll just be water over the dam, a distant lost memory with no lasting importance to the human race and of no eternal consequence?  How much of my life is so unintentional, so mundane that it becomes a blur along with every other wasted day in life? I don’t want to live a life of normalcy, but rather to live on the cutting edge and in fulfillment of God’s call on my life!

So did I get all my responsibilities at home and with The Fence Experts all wrapped up in a small neat little package and hand it over to John Esh with the sound of a full orchestra playing behind me like I had hoped to? No, I’m pretty sure it looked more like a box the size of a small car with everything thrown in there haphazardly, needing hours of sorting by the receiver and dropped off with a wheezing old tow truck to the ceremonious sounds of the impatient drivers’ horns lining up behind me as I unloaded my precariously huge box by the side of the road…. L The end of our time at home came upon me like a posse of wild horses overtaking an overweight lumbering bull:, I knew it would happen, but it still caught me by surprise. So here is a shout out to John Esh and all the wonderful people at The Fence Experts who are sorting through the large box! You guys are amazing!

I will miss being part of a company that is full of amazing and talented, energetic young men. I like that they care about more than just the almighty dollar and take time to focus on the important and long lasting eternal things like each other, and changing the people around them. I’m proud of the amazing people at The Fence Experts who are on their way to China in February to carry Bibles into a place where people don’t have a Bible to call their own. So leaving and not being a part of that anymore is a bit hard. But God has called Sara and I to invest in his kingdom in a different way right now, and so here we go, to learn all we can, and to invest as much as we can during this time.