One of my all-time favorite movies is “What About Bob?” with Bill Murray who plays a neurotic hypochondriac named Bob and Richard Dreyfuss who plays Bob’s uptight, ironically narrow-minded therapist, Dr. Leo Marvin. It’s an oldie but a goodie, in which Bob basically cures his own mental illness by driving Dr. Marvin to a mental breakdown. If somehow you’ve lived the past twenty-eight years without having seen it, I highly recommend it. 

There is a scene toward the end where Dr. Marvin is actually trying to kill Bob by blowing him up in the woods. I’m giggling just thinking about it and typing this out…sigh…Bob looks at this attempted murder as a clever new type of therapy which he calls “Death Therapy” and sees the ropes and restraints Dr. Marvin has bound him with as a metaphor for the chains the Bob has placed on himself his whole life and now needs to “break free” both in a literal and figurative sense.

Anyway (I’m getting to the point, I promise), I think I’m going through a sort of radical death therapy myself. While no one is actively trying to blow me up (though I know there are people out there who might fantasize about that), God is testing my limits and challenging me to break free of old, debilitating thoughts and behaviors that no longer serve me. 

For starters, we are selling our home. We have lived here for about two and a half years. I swore as we unpacked boxes in this house at that time, I would “NEVER MOVE AGAIN” with God as my witness. And yet, you can go ahead on MLS right now and see pictures of an impossibly clean version of our home waiting and ready for the perfect buyer who gets hot and bothered over a walk-in pantry and granite counter tops just like I did, once upon a time. I think our bigger goal is to have more yard for the kids to explore and less house to clean. Plus, it would be nice to have Scott’s commute to and from work shortened.

The second crazy thing is we have no idea where we are moving to! Agh! I know, right?! It’s so scary and so exciting at the same time. We have no plan. We might end up being renters if our house sells quickly enough. There was a time in my life where this would have completely freaked me out. But this time I am embracing whatever life throws at us and can I just say, this is such an incredibly freeing thing. 

I have a kid with severe anxiety, won’t this derail him? Won’t I be damaging all of our kids beyond repair with so much instability? Old Me used to hang on to self-defeating beliefs like that and allow myself to be held back, but not anymore! We go where the wind takes us (within a reasonable driving distance to our family and friends and a few modern conveniences, like Kroger). 

The truth is, I’ve always felt a little homesick in this house. When I look out at our half acre slice of suburbia, I can’t help but feel we just haven’t taken root here. We have great neighbors, we have my parents a mile up the road…what’s missing? 

I think for us it was heart. Somehow we got lost and try as we might, things just never felt right here. We’ve been living a life that we thought we “should” be living. We were doing all the things we thought “should” be making us happy, but they aren’t. We are still feeling empty at the end of the day. 

So we are changing that. We are pulling up our anchor and taking to the open sea of life. In the words of Bob, “I’m a sailor! I’m sailing!” 

We are letting go of the “shoulds” and going with the “coulds.” This could be a really amazing opportunity. This could be the change we needed. This could be the answer to our prayers.

And I’m sharing this with you because I am learning that our life path doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. We are never too old, too young, too rich, too poor, too fat, too thin, too inexperienced, or too broken to do our own kind of “right.”

LET GO! Stop holding yourself back because of FEAR of the unknown. If you feel compelled to do it, there is a reason. I don’t know what our future holds, but I know if we keep God in the center this time, we won’t get too far off course.

It’s getting late. I should wrap this up. I need to start researching goats and chickens. I know Grace will back me up. The boys might be a tougher sell. #LivingThatHomesteadLife.