It's a strange job that we have

Dragging your teenagers around with you in your job isn’t a normal job.

I "write" stuff all the time in my head, but it's a little strange that that sentence popped into my head earlier today. Of course I know that we don't have a "normal" job. But it suddenly occurred to me that most people don't take their teenagers to work with them. Most people don't have to negotiate and make lots of work-decisions with their kids in mind. At least not in the way that we do.

We're finding life and work at the moment is quite a tightrope, and it.
isn't easy to keep good balance.
Of course it is for most people, but the forces at play for us at
the moment are different to what we usually experience.

For example, twice this week I've declined "work" simply because of our boys. Both were churches more than an hour from where we live. 

One invited us to speak at both their morning services, one at 7.45, one at 9.30. In order to get to that we'd have to either leave inordinately early or stay the night. They offered to find us accomodation, but in the context of being only a couple of weeks after having spent ten days in Perth for work with our boys (plus a couple of other factors I won't name), we decided to decline the early service.

The other offered us opportunities to speak to mid-week groups. This is something we love to do, but in order to manage it, again we'd have to stay overnight somewhere, and probably more than one night. This one was easier to decide about because we've got only one car and a boy at school.

I know that kids influence most people's work decisions, but probably not quite to that degree.

Then I had another conversation with someone about when we'd next be in Australia for home assignment. Nothing is in "stone" yet, but we're thinking that we might come back for a few weeks in the middle of 2021, after our middle son graduates. But not for a longer period until 2023, after our youngest graduates from high school—five years away. This was greeted with shock. However, if you think about it, not many people with teenagers would like to rip their kids out of the school where all their friends are and move to another country for a year for work. Yes, I know it's what God's called us to do and we do it, but it isn't what most people are willing to do, nor what most employers ask of their employees (military excepting, of course).

Our boys have grown up doing this. We've been doing it since before we had children. It's a part of our lives. But that doesn't make it easy. In some ways it helps me to remember that we're doing hard stuff here. That being a teenager is hard enough without all these complications that our jobs and lifestyle add to the mix. I think they know that we care about them, that we try to make decisions with them in mind. I hope they do!

As we now go away for the weekend to a missionary conference, I hope that they will remember that we do try to consider them, even though we're dragging them along too. I  do hope that it is all worth it too, even though we might never know if it was.