He took one look at my tortured face. “What’s wrong?” he asked...
“We have to sell our house,” I replied.
In 1999, we had moved from our humble abode in Avalon to a much nicer one in West View because our pastor had had a dream. In the dream, he saw us settled in a brand new home. He said the house would be in a neighborhood where all the houses were alike, except ours.
Noble and I went house hunting immediately. When the real estate agent showed us the West View house, I heard in my spirit, “You can have this one if you want it.”
I wanted it. We bought it. And we lived there a little less than five years, loving every minute, treasuring every memory.
The Southern style was unlike any in the neighborhood. Large front posts supported a full-length second-story porch with a walkout from the primary bedroom. There were three bedrooms altogether on the second floor with two full bathrooms. On the first floor was a living room. A family room. A kitchen and dining room. Plus a half bath off the front entry. The finished basement had a recreation room and another half-bath. Finally, there was a large deck out back that overlooked a dense forest.
That house was beautiful, and losing it was so, so hard. We procrastinated for a short time (who could blame us), then put it on the market in November. A few weeks later it sold.
A third of the proceeds paid a healthy portion of my daughter’s college expenses.
She had attended an elite private high school, and every college she applied to accepted her. She chose the University of Maryland. It was far enough away for her to practice independence and close enough for us to be a tolerable drive. It also gave her a generous scholarship that paid most of her tuition.
The remaining proceeds went towards remodeling our house in Avalon.
We had rented it to a single mother with three growing boys. Heaven knows they needed the space. However, she bought a house of her own and had moved out shortly before we sold ours.
We thought, hey, let’s move back to Avalon.
The house was a wreck, though. We hired a contractor, then asked Mom if we could live in her attic while our house in Avalon was being refurbished.
As soon as we moved, I got an awesome assignment with an insurance company—talk about being paid to think. They wanted the architecture team from the railcar project, myself and another colleague, to re-architect one of their core systems. Together, we proposed a distributed component architecture that blew them away. It was months, however, before we knew how much they liked it, so we worked on other lesser assignments while we waited.
Meanwhile, Noble and I started attending a Methodist church down the street. We didn’t stay there long. The worship style was not what I was accustomed to, so we visited a Baptist church a short drive away.
When I walked into the vestibule of Bethlehem Baptist Church, the sheer number of children there overwhelmed me; their mere presence beckoned me. Something about them was irresistible. We joined Bethlehem in 2005, and that summer, I volunteered for Vacation Bible School (VBS). I had never worked with children in church before, or even wanted to. Yet, during that week of VBS, I discovered my purpose was no longer singing, but teaching the children of Bethlehem, and teach them I did. The Lord and I were an inseparable team. No Sunday wasted. That meant I never thwarted my responsibility to prepare, nor did I leave room for distraction.
So it seems God was intentional with his precise instruction. Though selling our beautiful West View home was painful, sad, and even sadder when our money ran out before the house in Avalon was livable; the extended years in Mom’s attic, the years at Bethlehem, were some of the best years of my life. During that time, not only did my soul prosper, but so did my career.
The insurance company we blew away with the re-architecture proposal hired me to augment their teams with my Rational Unified Process (RUP) knowledge—to teach as I worked beside them as their mentor.
“Kim, what should we do?”
That question became such a common thread in conversations at work that one day another colleague and friend sauntered over to my desk with a huge smile on his face.
“Kim. You should start your own business.”
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A Speculative Memoir
In a 1989 journal entry, I poured out my dashed dreams to God. Those few precious moments became a watershed event in an unfolding narrative that began ten years before when I turned my back on God. Turning my back on God did many things, most of them sad, but foremost it made me forget who I was. But there was someone who never forgot. Someone who neve…
