Figuring out what God wants me to do

A close friend recently sent me a link to a very helpful Facebook post. It’s written by Martyn Iles, an Australia Christian who has had an unusually public profile in recent years (in Australia Christians don’t typically get much press). Who he is isn’t as important as the wise things he’s written, so I won’t write any more about him. He wrote this in a Facebook post, but sharing a Facebook post is only helpful if someone has a Facebook profile, so I’ve copied the text here (for my future reference, if nothing else):

How can I know what God would have me do?

When I speak to people personally, some variant of this question is possibly the most common question I am asked.

There is a four principled decision making framework which has never failed me yet.

Importantly, all four principles are to be discerned in the context of sincere prayer about the decision.

1. Circumstances

Your circumstances will change (or not), without your manipulation or control, in a way that enables or reveals the right course of action. Because God is sovereign and works providentially.

2. Scripture

If you are a habitual student of scripture, it is likely that your reading and study will speak into your circumstances in a way that confirms the right course of action. Because God speaks to us reliably in His word.

3. Peace

It may take time - it's often the final confirmation - but ultimately you will be at peace about the right decision. That is to say, it may be hard or daunting, but your conscience will quietly confirm it. Because the Spirit of God works in our conscience.

4. Patience

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait!!!! STOP RUSHING! The scriptures are packed full with exhortations to "wait on the Lord." There are countless examples of God's slowness in the face of our hurry. Learn the discipline of patience or you will constantly make bad decisions. And you will *never* be worse off, or miss out, because you were patient. If you do, it just means it was never meant to be.

Now, you can be mistaken on one of the above - misreading circumstances, wrongly applying scripture, etc - but it is utterly unusual to be wrong about all four at the same time, especially in the context of patience and prayer.

When all four line up, that tends to be when I act. But often they don't, so I simply resist action, which is very hard.

Now, for matters of very great importance, I may have thought that all four principles were in alignment, yet the gravity of the decision was such that I was still reticent to make it.

In such circumstances, you can do a Gideon. You can pray for special confirmation and clarity - a "fleece." In His grace, God is ordinarily willing to provide it.

The alternative to the above is to plan your own way and make your own decisions, and expect God to catch up. That simply is not a life of faith. (End of the quote)

_____________

(Very annoyed right now because I've just lost several paragraphs here that I'd written here the other day...so on to to remembering what I wrote...)

What we see on earth is but a poor reflection of
what's truly going on (a much worse image than
we see here in a photo of the pond in the Japanese
garden at Mt Coot-tha).

I imagine that many people think that the decision of becoming a missionary must be one of the biggest we've ever made and that other decisions would be easy in comparison. While I could write much about the original decision, I will just say that there have been quite a number of times since then where decision making (and waiting for God's plan) has been hard.

A sample of times when this has seemed especially true in the last 25 years:

• When we were working towards to come to Japan and it took longer than we’d hoped
• When there was no teaching position for David in Japan for five years after we made ourselves available for that
• When my Japanese language ability never made it to a level suitable for working in it
• When I spent more time with sick kids than in doing any kind of outside ministry (or language learning) in our first term in Japan
• When our attempts to help our eldest learn Japanese language and culture by enrolling him in a Japanese primary school failed (we had to move him out after just 15 months)
• When we nearly didn’t get back to Japan in a timely fashion five years ago due to financial reasons
• When one of our sons encountered difficulties significant enough to derail our plan of moving him to Australia in 2021

Right now, as I've mentioned before, we're walking through the situation of seeking affordable rental accommodation for our younger two sons so that they can carry on their lives here while we head back to Japan. For various reasons we want to do that sooner rather than later.

What adds to the difficulty of this is not just that the rental system is under great stress here, but that our "public" lives mean that we've asked lots of people to pray about it, including our church. And people keep wanting updates. I want to jump straight to the end of the chapter and tell them a "success" story . . . but it's taking a while.

I really appreciated the wise older gentleman in our church who asked me last month, "Are you making progress?" 

This was a gentle and discerning way to ask and I could answer a wholehearted "YES". I felt encouraged, rather than needing to explain where we were up to and why we hadn't "succeeded" yet.

Back to the earlier quote, I really appreciate the emphasis on "wait". I am not naturally good at that, in general I tend to barrel ahead at considerable speed. Though I'd have to say that I have grown in this area in the decades since I became an adult. This particular waiting seems to be trying my patience and trust in God more than usual. But I'm trying hard to keep my eyes on Jesus.

I had coffee with a new friend this morning and we reflected on how we often don't know why God is doing something, or what his timing is, but we need to trust him regardless because he's so much wiser, more loving, and more powerful than us. That his thinking isn't the same as ours is clearly seen throughout the Bible, but perhaps no clearer than in the book of Job.

Here are a couple of verses I found along this line:

God’s voice thunders in marvellous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding.  (Jobe 27:5 NIV)

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.' (Is. 55:8–9)

So, we still await the end of this chapter of transitioning our sons to accommodation separate from us. It's going to be a good one! I can't wait to tell you about it!

Waiting with grace?

I started this blog post a couple of weeks, just after I sent out our latest prayer letter. Writing (mostly) monthly prayer letters is something I've been doing for over 23 years now. It's a useful time to reflect on the month past and look toward the month ahead. It would be a normal month when we look back at the calendar and say: "Wow, that only happened this month!" Of course at the end of the calendar year it's traditional to look back also, so I included this brief paragraph at the start of our letter:

For many, including us, this has been a hard year. There are many things that have happened differently to what we’d hoped or planned for. How are you coping? We’ve found comfort in doing the daily things that God’s given us to do and leaning hard on him in prayer about the things that we wish were different. As we come to the end of this year we know that God’s been with us the whole way, holding us and helping us. Let’s acknowledge the hard things, but also be quick to thank God for all he’s done and the hope he continues to give us.

This has been a year of disappointments and angst. Also waiting. That theme has continued to pop up for me in various places. How do we wait and do it with grace? Recently, a friend asked: How do we Christians do it with our hearts right with God, resting in his Sovereignty?

Waiting isn't new to me. I guess we all know about waiting, but somehow missionary life brings a different angle, maybe even a greater challenge to waiting. Just getting to Japan meant disappointment and waiting (we were turned down two, nearly three times for a lack of financial support in 2000). Every time we go on home assignment we wait to find accomodation and wheels, last time we left Japan without an address to go to in Australia. The last two times we've been on home assignment, we've waited for house sitters for this place in Tokyo too. With limited financial resources, we're thrown on the generosity of others more than perhaps we would have been if we had remained in Australia in higher paying jobs.

In some ways it's easier to describe what waiting badly looks like. A lot of times it's due to attitude. Waiting badly can look like complaining, it can look like frantic activity to fill the blank left or to distract ourselves. It can also look like scheming to "fix" the problem and manipulate the situation so that it "works". It can look like worry and even physical sickness that's induced by worry. It can look like insomnia or tears. And yes, I know this because I've got personal experience in waiting badly!

But of course you can't look at someone and easily determine if they are waiting well or badly! However, by talking to them, you might get a glimpse.

Good waiting, in my experience, is much more peaceful. There's a quiet trust in God that this too is in his plan. Waiting well doesn't mean inactivity, but rather seeking what is the right thing to do now. That's been a big challenge for us this year as we've waited, especially, to see how God would guide us for the next steps for our nearly-adult kids.

One key to waiting well is to find pleasure in the now. Find ways to enjoy your current situation. Don't forgo celebration, instead seek out reasons to celebrate, reasons to give thanks. Another key is to find ways to serve others, within our limits, of course. When you're waiting it's easy to turn inwards, to be selfish and self absorbed. But when we turn our thoughts upwards to God and outwards to others we gain a better perspective on our situation.

Some lights we often walk past at night. This
is a little unusual in Japan.

We're about to go away for our traditional pre-Christmas holiday. I've been waiting for this break for too long. I'm thankful God's given me the strength to make it through to now and that I'm not a messy heap on the floor. But I'm also glad he's given me things to do while I waited that kept my eyes off myself (most of the time).

I don't know what you're waiting for, but I do know the Lord who can help. Don't miss him in the midst of the wait.

If you're interested, here are three other blog posts I've written on waiting:

I told our waiting-to-come-to-Japan story is here (a summary, really).

The value of waiting for your prayers to be answered: http://mmuser.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-other-end-of-answered-prayer.html

Waiting expectantly, but like a jellyfish: https://mmuser.blogspot.com/2021/04/waiting-expectantly.html

Non-typical retreating

Considering spiritual retreats—I think that I've pretty much decided that I do better with an "active" or "creative" one, rather than a more traditional retreat that requires spends a lot of time alone in meditation or reflection. I think better while I'm riding my bike or walking. I think reflectively while I'm being creative too, like baking and cooking, taking photos and cross stitching. And, of course, writing, helps me to think and to solidify my thoughts. Writing retreats have been so energising to me in the last 10 or so years, and writing here has been a constant help to me as I've processed and pondered God's truths and reflected on what's be going on in my life.

Anyway, the other day I took a few hours to ride to the "big park" and a cafe, and it turned into something of a retreat: a time to ponder God's word, and reflect on life. I'm regretting not writing about it straight away, but here are some lingering thoughts from a few meagre notes I took.

I stopped here in the park. This was not a typical retreat.
Here I read a novel, not the Bible or a Christian non-
fiction book!

"Be still and know that I am God" 

This has been a phrase I've repeatedly been drawn to in the last couple of years. At the start of the day I happened upon a reflection and song by an acquaintance of mine based on Psalm 46 (see the reflection here and song here). She noted that though the psalm famously says "Be still, and know that I am God", it's not a psalm set in the middle of peace and quiet, it's actually a psalm about trouble and war. It was often referred to in the aftermath of the 2011 triple disaster in northern Japan. It refers to God being our fortress, that he is "with us" even through terrible things like nations being in an uproar and the earth melting! 

And indeed I can testify to God being with me through what rates as one of the most trying years of my life thus far, most of the details I've been unable to share with you. The mere fact that we're still standing and functioning fairly well is testimony to God's great graciousness.

Isaiah 40

I also reflected on Isaiah 40. It's the chapter I did a retreat on last year, and actually as I look back over this blog and see that this chapter has come up a number of times in the last five years. It's a great passage.

This time I noted the huge contrast between weak and strong. Humans are repeatedly described as weak—young, ordinary, and ones needing comfort. We're compared to grass and flowers that both quickly fade, like grasshoppers. Even rulers are described as weak and fragile compared to God's strength. And God is repeatedly described in powerful ways—that his word stands forever, as someone who can mark off the heavens with the breadth of his hand, who "weighs the islands as though they were fine dust", whose mere breath can sweep away rulers, the creator of the earth and heavens. And he doesn't get tired. His understanding has no limits.

The chapter ends with great hope: that the God who doesn't have limits, gives strength to those who trust in him, who put their hope in him. Though the gap between our capacity is so enormous it isn't measurable, God chooses to reach down and help us in our weakness. That's great news and one that we repeatedly need reminding of.

The Chosen

At the time we were watching the TV series The Chosen. It's a seven-season series about the life of Christ, and it's free. They've done the first two seasons and we've really enjoyed it so far. They don't pretend it is scripture, but they've tried to fill in some of the story around what we read in the gospels. It's so interesting to see what life then might have been like, to imagine what the disciples were like and how they experienced the journey with Jesus.

In one of the episodes, Peter comes to Jesus with ideas about creating some processes to smooth out the relationships between the disciples. Jesus said to him: Yes Peter, I can see you have leadership potential, but not now. Just wait. There will come a time" (my paraphrase). It was another way of saying "Be still". 

Waiting

Waiting is a meta-theme in the Bible. It comes up again and again, in individual lives, as well as in the wider context of the nation of Israel. So we shouldn't be surprised to find waiting is part of our every day experience of the Christian life either.

Here's a sample from the Bible:

"I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him” (Lamentations 3:10).

"I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope" (Psalm 130:5).

But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently" (Romans 8:25).

"While we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13).

Japanese has a brilliant phrase for this sort of waiting: machinozomu, which means "wait in eager expectation".

So, that was my ride-which-became-a-retreat. Remembering how God has called me to be still, even if everything around me is falling apart. And why can I be still in that context? Because he is God, he is much stronger, more wise and capable than I am. But also remembering that there is no magic solution that will appear at my whim, I have to wait. Because God is God and infinitely more wise than I am, what he's got in mind for my life I can't comprehend, nor can I bring it about—I must wait in hope. I must trust him.

Waiting expectantly

"Be still and know that I am God" is a Bible phrase that's been known to me since I was a child. It's taken on new significance in the past two years.

At the end of 2019 I wrote here:

That verse was given to me on a little card at the spiritual retreat I went to in May. It's a verse I've known since childhood, but only recently have I realised the deeper meaning of it: God is way above my ability to understand him, I need to continually relax my desire to control things and people around me and let God be God. I need to continually remember that worry doesn't help and God actually tells us not to be anxious (Philippians 4:6). I can walk away from my work and leave anything unresolved in God's hand. I can go to sleep at night and leave all my concerns with him.

Then in November last year I wrote here about my frustration at not being able to make plans. In that post I wrote, "Right now, for us, it’s time to wait, and trust in the Lord with all our hearts, leaning not on our own understanding and God will direct our paths (paraphrase from Proverbs 3:5-6)." 

Sadly, things seems even more uncertain now than they did five months ago. Every time we make a longer-range plan, it seems to be dashed.

On Friday this Scripture verse came up on my daily desk calendar:

In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice;
in the morning I lay my requests before you
and wait expectantly. (Ps. 5:3 NIV)

Oh, we've been waiting expectantly, for what feels like a long time! I like that phrase, though, it turns "waiting" into something that's more active. It appears in Luke also (3:15), when the Jews were wondering if John the Baptist was possibly the Messiah. Japanese has a great phrase for this: 待ち望む (machi nozomu) literally "wait" and "hope". In other places the English uses phrases like "wait in hope" (see Ps. 33:20, Isaiah 51:5, and Micah 7:7). Psalm 130:5 puts it even strongly: "my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope".

And I then this morning I read this article that uses the metaphor of jellyfish and how they go with the sea current. The author writes:

I think at times God just wants us to wait, too. Could we surrender our agenda or our anxiety about the next? Could we stop striving and just “go with Him”? If we could learn to float like jelly and go with His flow, we may just reach the destination in a more peaceful and enjoyable way. 

And she finishes with this prayer:

Father, You are so creative. . . Help us to stop striving and be at peace in the process. Remind us to relax and wait. Help us to not be in a hurry for Your answer but to soak in the time of waiting. Amen.

I know we're not alone at the frustration of this period. Many of us are waiting, and the waiting is wearying. But can we stop our striving? Can we be still and know God at this time? I know it's my daily challenge right now, and probably for some time to come. How about you?

Waiting

I'm rather an impatient person and have a streak of impulsiveness in me. That's not such a good admission to make. Though God's been working on me over the years. 

One of the biggest things we've had to wait for was permission to come to Japan as missionaries. That story involved nearly three years of waiting. Though I know people wait far longer than that for things, but in the midst, it felt like a very long time, especially when we didn't know the end result. During that period our eldest son was born and we had the uncertainty of David quitting his regular employment so that we could focus on preparing for Japan. 

What held back our permission was a lack of promised finance. But I think that God was preparing our hearts too. If he'd allowed us to go to Japan quickly, we wouldn't have learnt to rely on him quite so much. And we therefore would have struggled more in those early years in Japan when it was really hard to be here. In the waiting and the leaning on God, we got confirmation that this is truly where he wants us. We also gained spiritual "muscle". Nothing like having to trust in the midst of big uncertainty to develop that.

What we're particularly waiting on now is answers about what our son will be studying next year. I guess our expectations have changed. When we were students, it was just accepted that you didn't know your tertiary entrance score until nearly Christmas and then you didn't know what you got accepted into until mid-January, only about five weeks before university started. 

I look at it now and am a bit shocked at how little time there is between finding out what you're accepted into and when you start. But that is only because we've been living in an environment where our son's classmates knew a long time before graduation where they'd be going to college (conditional on good results, though I'm not sure how this works). I guess it is also a factor of our lifestyle that makes that shortness of time shocking. We can't just drive down the road to the uni, we've got to book flights . . . thankfully he's applied to universities all in the same area and our best guess is that he'll get into one of the courses there. We also tend to be planners. We like to plan things out a fair way ahead of time, especially big things, so that makes the unknownness of this a little challenging. Though it's not really that big a deal. We're going ahead planning anyway—even though we don't know the details of what—we at least know when and where (i.e. Brisbane) and accomodation has been sorted.

Soon we'll head into the pre-home assignment wait too. When we're looking at finding accommodation and transport for our months in Brisbane. More waiting. More leaning into God. (Here's another post I wrote about waiting and it's value.)

But big or small waiting (waiting for news about holiday accomodation that you want to book can be hard)—it's challenging and an opportunity to grow.

I was sparked to write about waiting by a post I saw on Velvet Ashes called High Speed Waiting. I do recommend you go and take a peek at it. It's much nicer writing than mine has been today. 

Food for thought

Usually I share my own words here, but I've come across some good words of others in the last 24 hours that I want to share.

First is musings from the hospital bed of our mission's Japan director. He's battling two kinds of blood cancer. The post is pretty self-explanatory and very insightful.

Life in Limbo by David Ferguson
Most of us probably live our lives with a reasonable degree of predictability. There is routine. We make plans and generally they come to pass. We might even set goals and seek to fulfil them. Tomorrow will come, next week will come and while we know that things can change suddenly, generally life moves on with some measure of certainty. 

What happens though when that certainty is taken away? What if you don't know what's going to happen? What if there are questions but no answers - or at least no answers that are very definitive? Not easy if you're the kind of person who likes certainty, who makes plans and who wants to know what's going to come next. For the last months we've lived with that uncertainty - life is in limbo!

My particular case is rare. I don't just have one blood cancer (and that type is unusual enough) but another more aggressive one too which makes my situation even more unique and more uncertain. It's hard even for the doctors to predict and sometimes the answer is ‘we don't know!’ One doctor friend back home said this which sums it up well : ‘humanly speaking there remains a lot of uncertainty about what may happen - it's a high stakes battle and there usually aren't any guarantees’. 

So how do you deal with that and live in limbo? Well, one way is just to let go and accept that however much we might like to be in control of our lives and know with some certainty what's going to happen, that will not be the case. You have to learn to live with uncertainty. You need to take a day at a time knowing tomorrow might bring different news which may even just add to the uncertainty! All of that is easier said than done. We can know times of peace as well as times of anxiety, fretting and simply wanting to know where it's all going!

There is something else though and that is learning more and more to trust the One who does know the beginning from the end and who knows exactly what is happening and what will happen. Maybe one of the purposes of this whole time is simply that as a family we might learn that valuable lesson even more. There is a great verse in Proverbs which says - ‘Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails’. Sometimes it is like opening both hands to God, one crying to him with our heart’s desires and the other saying ‘may your will be done’. And in the midst of it all trusting in our unchangeable and faithful God is the only place to go if we want real certainty. ‘Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’. As a follower of Jesus, there may well be many things in our lives we don't understand or for which there don't seem to be answers but as we lift our eyes to our God and fix our eyes on the unseen things, we find a certainty which will never fail us.

Wise words from the depths of a really difficult situation. We've had situations of waiting and "limbo" before, but none that have been life-threatening. Our biggest time of limbo was when we were preparing to come to Japan. We spent a couple of years waiting for financial-clearance-green-light from our mission. We learnt much in that time of waiting that has stood us in good stead in the years since.

As the years go by, we've also prayed for many who have been in life-threatening situations. Some have had miraculous recoveries or rescues, others have instead had their lives on this earth ended. For those who were Christians, their miraculous healing didn't happen in front of us, but instead as they entered heaven. 

So, knowing that God heals and has the power to work in these situations can make it difficult to know how to pray. Here I found another couple of lengthy quotes as I read Prayer by Timothy Keller last night.

Augustine [a great theologian in the first millennia after Jesus] . . . argues that not only can we grow in prayer in spite of these difficulties but because of them. He concludes his letter [to a young widow friend who'd lost almost everything in the sacking of Rome in 410AD] by asking his friend, "Now what makes this work [of prayer] specially suitable to widows but their bereaved and desolate condition?" Should a widow not, he asked, "commit her widowhood, so to speak, to her God as her shield in continual and most fervent prayer?" What a remarkable statement. Her sufferings were her "shield"--they defended her from the illusion of self-sufficiency and blindness that harden the heart, and they opened the way for the rich, passionate prayer life that could bring peace in any circumstance. He calls her to embrace the situation and learn to pray." (p88)

These are again Augustine's thoughts on prayer:

Even the most godly Christian can't be sure what to ask for when we are enduring difficulties and suffering. "Tribulations...may do us good... and yet because they are hard and painful...we pray...that they may be removed from us." Should we pray, then, for a change in circumstances or just for strength to endure them? Augustine points to Jesus' own prayer in Gethsemane, which was perfectly balanced between honest desire ...and submission to God...He points also to Romans 8:26, which promises that the Spirit will guide our hearts and prayers when we are groaning and confused_and God will hear them even in their imperfect state. So, Augustine concludes, pour out your heart's desire, but remember the wisdom and goodness of God as you do so. (pp87-88)

Food for thought, all of it.

The other end of answered prayer

I periodically talk about answered prayer here. I certainly try to report on answered prayer when I write our monthly prayer/newsletter. But today, I'm thinking about earlier, the time when I don't yet have an answer to my prayer.

The story of this house's provision for us
in 2010 and continued provision for us
as of July this year is a story I need to keep
telling myself.

That is a hard place. It's a place where you lack control. You don't know what's going to happen with that particular need or desire. You are left with trust. Trust in prayer and trust in the God who provides.

I have to admit I haven't had to wait for really big answers, like healing from a terminal illness, or the protection of a loved one from violent death or even for a child to be given to me. 

But I have had to wait for jobs, cars, houses, a husband, for financial provision after quitting a job, for permission to do what we've been telling everyone we were going to do (become missionaries in Japan), and for the provision of shelter and furniture  for my family as we change countries every few years. I've had to wait for my children to go through difficulties at school and at home, wait to see the results of the parenting I try my best to do. Wait for smaller things like someone to take care of my kids at a key moment when I don't have any family in the country, or for someone to give me or my kids a lift school in the rain.

I have discovered that in the waiting is value. While I wait, I grow in my trust in my heavenly father. Because I've waited for God's financial provision, I'm less stressed next time such a situation occurs. Because I've seen God answer these prayers, I know that He can provide for me. When I retell myself the stories of the last time He answered my prayer, I relax a little. I relinquish my desire to control the outcome. And I put my eyes back on Him, waiting for his provision for me.

It still isn't easy, because like most people I like to think I am in control, and not knowing how something will work out means I have little control. It makes me anxious and frustrated.

But I try to cling to the knowledge that my God does care about me and He does provide all I need, even if it isn't in the way or with the timing that I imagine would be best.

Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,    neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.“As the heavens are higher than the earth,    so are my ways higher than your ways    and my thoughts than your thoughts.

So, what I imagine and plan for this transition back to Japan, may or may not be the way it works out. 

Romans 8:25, 28, 31-32. "But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. . . . And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. . . What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

So, I'm here today to remind myself to: 

Psalm 27:14 "Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord."

Waiting

I'm feeling a bit at sea again today. I think I'm in a bit of a trough between peaks of excitement. There's wrestling, of course, the next meet is tomorrow night. But also coming up is: 

• the changing of bedrooms on the weekend (see yesterday's post), 
  
• an entertaining night on Friday to look forward to (the Seniors put on their annual Talent Show fundraiser for their March trip to Thailand), 
• and a fun Australia Day gathering on Sunday evening.

Plus I'm waiting. I've got someone interested in taking on the Managing Editor's position. Yay! But she and her husband are taking some time to consider it. I'm waiting.

I'm also waiting for a number of other things: people to get back to me on various questions related to the publication projects I'm working on, and waiting for the next round of submissions to come in for the magazine (due next Friday).

Then there's longer-term waiting to 

• begin packing up,
• know what will happen with this house, and our car,
• find out where we'll be living in Australia and what car we'll be driving, 
• find out how our boys fit into life there, and
• know what this next phase of our lives will look like.

I tend to thrive a little on excitement and the adrenaline of wrestling is clearly messing with my brain, but obviously our upcoming transition is beginning to work havoc as well.

There are things I could be or should be working on, but I'm really having trouble working up the enthusiasm to do so. Grrr. It's time to head to the gym and have lunch. Perhaps after that I'll feel more motivated.