Compost Studios

Let’s get a few things straight upfront. I could describe myself as a person who seeks out new places and experiences, who craves change, who loves to travel and experience new foods and foreign cultures, who is spontaneous, adventurous, and the first to jump in and try something new. And ALL of that would be a big, fat lie.

The truth is far less interesting. I’m an average American, white-bread, suburban mother of two, married to a conservative, traditional guy. We’re the law-abiding, church-attending, community volunteer, salt-of-the-earth types. We even have boring hobbies. Our life is not the stuff of sitcoms. We’re not the interesting people at the party. We’re not the subject of gossip or people in the know. Go ahead and yawn if you want to, but this is our reality.

Now let’s flashback to July 2004.

I was in the middle of a typical summer with my kids. There were camps, play dates, swim lessons, library programs, days at the pool and trips to the beach on the calendar. I was working part-time from home as a PR consultant and writer, a job I’d held for 10 years. My husband E was commuting to the Washington, D.C. area to his government office. Sitting at my desk in the heat of the day, I received an e-mail from E.

“What do you think of three years in Brussels?” A job announcement was attached.

Without hesitation, I responded immediately. “Sounds pretty cool! Let’s talk when you get home.”

E was shocked. This was not the reply he expected from me. We’d been rooted in our community for 15 years and had never seiously discussed living anywhere else, let alone moving overseas.

But I’m a spiritual person and from that first moment the topic was broached, moving across the world to Brussels inexplicably struck me as the right thing to do. When E tells this story, he emphasizes my response to his initial query, implying I’m the reason we’re here. But hey, he’s the one that sent the message and posed the question—and that certainly wasn’t an accident. We were in this together from Day 1.

With very few details in hand about the job or our prospective circumstances, E worked late into the night on an extensive and complicated job application and sent it off. Then the waiting began.

In America, the hiring process from start to finish often takes just a matter of weeks. We had no idea what to expect with the Brussels job, but we thought we would hear something in September.

We heard nothing. We learned through the grapevine that the list of applicants for the job was several pages long, and yet we still felt sure it was going to come through, we just didn’t know when. Our certainty was not born out of arrogance but out of a sense of destiny. Still, life felt suspended and small and large decisions were postponed.

Finally in early November, E flew to Brussels for an interview and we celebrated the holidays wondering what our future would be. A few days after Christmas, a letter arrived by courier announcing he had been chosen by the interview panel but final approval of the panel’s selection was still pending. Then in February, the formal announcement and job offer arrived—on E’s birthday.

This further confirmed our sense of being called to Belgium. E had been born a Belgian citizen in the Belgian Congo in 1957. His father had died in a plane crash in the unrest that followed the Congolese revolution, and when he was about six, his mom had married an American State Department employee she met in Africa. E lived in various countries in Africa and Europe before moving to the U.S. as a teenager. Receiving the job offer on his birthday was a sign he had come full circle.

From that point on, it seemed everything fell into place, but that’s not to say things were easy. We were overwhelmed with paperwork and tasks to complete on two continents, trying to anticipate everything we needed to do before we left on March 20. And if I occasionally succumbed to insomnia or crying jags, I felt God was in the details during these hectic weeks—providing a friend to rent our house who needed it as much as we needed a trustworthy tenant, putting E’s classic car into the hands of a teen who had also lost his dad in a plane crash, settling our silky terrier in with a new widow who needed his company, finding a buyer for our truck days before we were scheduled to fly out.

And Providence proved itself up until the last minute.

The house was empty, our belongings on their way. We were staying in a hotel, and E had to drop our remaining car off in Baltimore, Maryland, to be shipped to Belgium. On his way up Interstate 95, he was annoyed because he realized he didn’t have the screwdrivers he would need to remove the license plates from the car before it was taken away. He had to stop in his office in Alexandria, Virginia, on his way north and catch a train home from Baltimore. On a tight schedule, he didn’t have time to find a store and buy screwdrivers.

As he was handling paperwork in his old office building, the woman who was now occupying his former cubicle came up to him with a bag.

“E, I found this stuff in the back of one of your desk drawers and wanted to give it to you,” she said.

E opened the bag and his eyes opened wide in disbelief. The sack contained two screwdrivers—one with a straight end, one shaped like a cross. Two screwdrivers he’d found on a desolate roadside years before and shoved into a drawer and forgotten about but reappeared at just the right moment. These were the final evidence we were being equipped for whatever Belgium would bring.

We left Dulles Airport two days later in a spring thunderstorm. For months we’d been monitoring Belgium’s weather, and it seemed each time we’d log on to the computer we’d see a solid row of gray cloud icons and forecasts for rain. We told ourselves that if the sun was shining when we arrived, it would be a good sign. As our plane touched down on the runway on the first day of spring, the sun was glinting off the red tile roofs and bright green fields surrounding the airport.

(Coming next Thursday—Trials and Tribulations. The first two weeks)