Sometimes God's plans seem so blurry.

I should warn those of you reading that I am going to be spewing all sorts of randomness in this post, and undoubtedly (since I'm just starting out) am going to touch on some issues that I haven't yet had the chance to elaborate on in my blog. Proceed with caution....

When life gets tough, I like to hold on to the thought that "God has a plan." I know that I don't always know what it is when it's happening, but I know it's there. There are two very important times in my past when I struggled A LOT to try to understand what God's plans for me were... but it wasn't until months later that I was able to look back and say, "Hey, now I get it!" Until then, I just had to follow what FELT right to me.

D and I are standing at a crossroads in a lot of different aspects of life. It's very confusing, and very frustrating... and also very frightening too.

We are looking at our life ahead of us, and there are some things that seem so incredibly daunting. This life that we are currently living (with D working a full-time job and a part-time job) and me working full-time has no immediate end in sight. We can not live on just our day job incomes in our current location. He won't be able to drop his part-time job until Dois gets to Kindergarten in 2016, and our monthly expenses for childcare go down greatly. We could survive on just D's two-job salary, but the end goal is not for me to work less, but to get him to a point where he doesn't have to work two jobs. We also feel very differently about having more children--I would love to have another one, but he feels we're maxed out at two. As much as I would love more, I look at our current predicament and realize that another child would mean D would have to work 2 jobs well past 2016. And it already feels exhausting... because we've been doing this for almost 9 years now... we want an end in sight.

D hoped to go to grad school in an effort to get a better-paying job in the university system. The blessing of working for the university is that he can go to school for free! Being an international student, though, his grades are not stellar. We found out today that he didn't get into the graduate program we hoped he would (because it's entirely online) because they counted two music classes he took after graduation but then had to drop (due to getting a new job), lowering his GPA to below their acceptable average. He WAS accepted into another Master's program, but it's not entirely online--he would need to take 1/2 his courses in person. Meaning, he'd be working FT, working PT, and going to school PT. And what would take 2-3 years to finish could take up to 5.

Add into all this uncertainty that BOTH of our jobs are very vulnerable right now (my company is not doing well, has had layoffs, and is saying November will tell if we will survive in 2013; D works for the state university system and there have been constant budget cuts with another possible one appearing on the November ballot)... and it just feels like too much. It feels too overwhelming.

We're trying desperately to figure out how to break out of this system... because our family suffers from it. We're working so hard to better our lives but at what cost?

Pray for us. Because all I know how to do right now is to pray for insight and peace.