The Big Move
Caid’s high school wrestling coach once told him something like this: “You pick up everyone else’s moves really quick, and you are good—but you need to make them your own.”
Caid learns by doing.
When Caid and I got married, he learned a lot about me and how I did life by doing things my way. I thought it was great, because I married someone just like me, when really—he just hadn’t learned his own moves yet.
We came to Brazil when I was 7 months pregnant with our first child. She was born in Brazil and Caid had to jump into doing everything as I was busy making a human. Once the dust settled we had another baby. By the time we looked up, somewhere along the way, Caid was not doing well.
We both figured he’d get it eventually: he just needed to learn his own moves.
Things were looking up: Caid was finding his place with music and generally everything else ran pretty smoothly. Until it wasn’t. A series of really hard things happened the end of 2019, and it left my heart really sore. During a morning moment with God, I felt something change in my heart. I felt God say it was okay to just focus on my family now: that I didn’t have to hold it all together or save the world. It wasn’t that He let me go from my calling to Brazil, He just molded the parameters a bit.
I didn’t know what to do with this heart change- for the first time, I felt at peace with returning to the USA- and Caid wanted to stay and work out God’s calling for him.
But my freedom led to his freedom to let go.
Somewhere along the Christian way, Caid subconsciously learned that being in ministry was the best way to serve God. From the first day of knowing Jesus, he’d wanted to serve God with his whole heart. So he would just struggle through missions until it worked because this was how he could serve God best.
I was struggling with my own subconscious lies: somewhere along my Christian way I’d learned that missions was supposed to be for life, and if not, it meant you’d messed up or done something wrong.
Caught in our own battles, we didn’t look up to see that somewhere over our 6 years of marriage, we’d stopped walking hand in hand. Caid had slowed down to a crawl. To keep things moving, I’d piggybacked him and kept on going.
Caid didn’t know how to put what he felt into words, so it started coming out in anger. I didn’t know how to read emotions, so I withdrew. Luckily, Caid is much better in asking for outside help than I am. He realized he was lame before I realized my back was broken (spiritually speaking).
In February 2020, Caid said, “I just don’t think God made me to be a career missionary. A missionary yes, for my whole life—but not a career missionary.”
This understanding, that God had given him many spiritual gifts, and he would serve God no matter what he did—and that it didn’t have to be specifically “in ministry,” was instantly freeing. The moment he had the freedom to say those words I saw his face change: I saw Caid again—the real Caid, not the stressed, tired, angry Caid I had come to know more recently.
We started working through what this meant for our family. This whole time God was blessing our ministry in Brazil a lot. Caid was building relationships and starting choirs and training voices. Living Stones was growing faster than ever before. In fact, by the end of 2019, I realized with happiness and tears, that my baby (Living Stones), was all grown up. That the leaders were strong and had caught the vision and were sharing the vision of church planting through child sponsorship.
I had done what I had come to do.
By the time I realized my back was broken (figuratively), we realized the only reason we were staying in Brazil was because I wanted to—and that wasn’t enough. Then a pandemic happened. It gave us time to shelter in place and really put words to all of this, where previously we just had all these emotions flying around. It gave us time to grieve and snuggle in as a family.
We haven’t worked out all the details.
We are heading back to the USA. Caid is teaching at a high school in Indiana. I will be working with World Renewal in the USA. To those of you who support us: thank you.
Thank you for believing in us and walking with us during this journey. I hope we can continue this conversation individually with each one of you. We really, really need you during this time of transition—more than ever. We are so grateful for God working in our lives and growing us to these changes—but they are big and unknown and sometimes scary. This is a really big move, but when we are following and walking with Jesus, it feels more like home.