I’ve wanted to write this story down long before this moment, but I knew it wasn’t quite finished yet. In fact, this story reaches its denouement—that moment in the narrative when all the tangled threads are pulled apart to reveal what was true all along—in just a few hours.
Before we get there, though, let’s go back to last fall.
On October 11, 2023, just after lunch, I was in my office writing when I heard my husband’s car beep from the driveway. My stomach turned over at the sound. Pierce had left for work that morning with a grim expression, months of stress and frustration an unwanted companion on a day we sensed would give us answers—good or bad—for the challenges he’d been facing at his job. There was no reason for him to be home at that hour unless he had bad news, and I sat at my desk, spine rigid, listening to the familiar sounds of his arrival—the front door chime, his long, loping steps, the hollow thump of the stairs—knowing that when he finally appeared at my office door, I would crumple. And I did.
After fourteen years at the same company—nearly the length of our entire marriage— Pierce had just lost his job.
As we had long suspected it would, a difficult situation at work had grown worse in recent weeks. We knew it was time for Pierce to go, but leaving the company he’d been with for a decade-and-a-half was no small feat. He was so busy with events at the stadium that there was little time to devote to family or even rest, much less extensive job hunting. (A full-time job on its own.) In his most vulnerable moments, I also knew Pierce carried hope that maybe, just maybe, things would get better. It was the hope of a good man, a man who deserved more.
Instead, he was given two choices. The right move was obvious to us both, and Pierce walked away from fourteen years with zero job prospects but a generous severance. Our emotions were all over the place that week: sadness, disappointment, and relief. We were grateful for God’s financial provision, even while we wrestled with a thousand new questions and unknowns. (Oh, and rage. Hell hath no fury like the wife of a good man who has been scorned.)
Surprising us both, the next few weeks were filled with joy despite the constant uncertainty in which we spent our days. For the first time since were newlyweds, and certainly since we became parents, Pierce and I had nearly unlimited time with one another. He spent each day hard at work applying for jobs while I managed our home, finances, and schedules—but we were together. We went on daily walks, pounding out our prayers and what-ifs on the pavement. I watched my husband lay down his battered ego at the feet of his Heavenly Father and become, somehow, an even better man than he already was. We went deep into our faith, leaving breadcrumbs along the path in case we couldn’t find our way back, hoping all the time that we wouldn’t get lost in our wanderings.
Weeks, then months, passed. Meeting after meeting, coffee after coffee, interview after interview…nothing happened. The holidays came and went. Pierce grew more nervous as the new year arrived, knowing that his severance was running out and multiple job prospects were still up in the air. The weight of providing for a family of four was a heavy one, and by that point I was applying for jobs, too, with nothing to show for it. Still, I treasured the peace in my spirit, born of my own hardships with mental health over the years, because I had seen God’s faithfulness time and time again. I had lived through many dark nights of the soul, nights that eventually became light, and Pierce had been my steady hand through all of those seasons. It was a wonder for me to finally become his.
In January, we took the plunge and decided it was time to put our house on the market. We had purchased this home in 2021 and planned to live here for the rest of our lives. It’s a beautiful 1960s ranch with a finished basement and more room than we sometimes know what to do with. (Except for my office with the French doors. I know exactly what to do with that 📚.) But it’s also in a city growing more crowded and expensive by the day with property taxes and flood insurance that continue to rise no matter how much we wish they wouldn’t. The loss of Pierce’s salary meant staying here was no longer feasible, nor wise, so we called our realtor. I sobbed at the kitchen table when we hung up the phone, oddly relieved and grief-stricken at the same time.
Where will you move? loved ones asked when we told them the news. What if Pierce doesn’t have a job yet when the house sells? What will you do then? We heard these questions over and over, and our answer was always some version of the same. God has been good to us. He will be good to us again. Part of our certainty was hard-won faith. The bigger part was having no other choice but to step forward and trust we wouldn’t fall on our asses.
We made regular predictions about how God would do nothing that didn’t require our full trust in Him to make it work. “Watch,” I joked to anyone who would listen, “God’s going to give Pierce a job right when we put the house on the market and run out of money.”
By then, Pierce was up for positions in Savannah, New Jersey, Manhattan, and Atlanta. I practically lived on Zillow during those weeks, saving homes in every city, trying to imagine us somewhere far away and failing every time. We attended university near Savannah and still have friends there, so that job prospect felt promising. It wasn’t so far away that we couldn’t make it back to metro Atlanta in a few hours if need be, and I was desperate to stay close to my family. The biggest hang-up we had for every city except Atlanta was where we’d go to church. It felt impossible to think of starting over again somewhere new less than a year after our transition to Trinity. Our church is home to us now, and neither Pierce nor I ever got the sense that we were supposed to leave it, even while he was in second and third interview rounds with companies across the country.
God has been good to us, we repeated to each other, needing to feel the truth of those words in our bones. He will be good to us again.
A funny thing about goodness, though, is God’s definition of the word is often much different from ours. His concern for us is primarily about Kingdom business, not creature comforts, and if we want to experience the rich fullness of what He has to offer then we have to be willing to lay down our expectations—what we want, what we need, what we “deserve”—at His feet. The details of these past six months, what I witnessed come to fruition in both my husband’s heart and our marriage, are too precious to share here. But I will share that while we grieved the loss of Pierce’s job, our home, and our certainty about the future, we knew that we were loved. And it made all the difference.
Every picture came off the walls then and we boxed up all our personal items as painters descended upon the house. Soon, our home looked like an AirBNB, sparse but pretty, and a photographer came to take pictures so it could go to market that next Thursday, February 15th.
On Thursday, February 8th, Pierce and I were at home with the kids when he came hurrying into the living room, face stricken and pale. “The hiring manager just called and I missed it.” He’d had his third and final interview for a director position in Atlanta the day before, so we’d been expecting a call at any moment. Unfortunately, the manager had phoned when Pierce was on a Zoom meeting with the company who’d hired him for some contract work. He tried calling back, but it went to voicemail. To keep ourselves busy while we waited, Pierce went back downstairs to his office and I started the dishes.
It was early afternoon, and light streamed into the window above the sink like a sweet promise. I prayed as I scrubbed, singing along to worship music with tears on my cheeks as the words “Light of the world, reaching out for us” rang out in the kitchen. I opened the back door to empty the recycling bin and, suddenly, there was another song. A cardinal, crimson and round with new life, was perched high in the tree by our fence, peering at me as it trilled its familiar call, a promise to me from other painful seasons that hope was still here. I stood in the doorway, transfixed, and then laughed out loud. All would be well. All was already well.
An hour later, Pierce ran into the living room, eyes alight. A beat passed between us before he spoke, all those months of anxiety and stress passing away like a breath. “I got it,” he said, and I crumpled again. This time, with tears of joy.
Our house went on the market the next Friday, Pierce started his new job the following Monday, and wouldn’t you know it? His first paycheck arrived in our bank account the same week his severance ran out, nearly down to the dollar.
For many years, I considered faith a thing to be performed and perfected. I wrote a whole book about my struggle with this idea and how God upended that narrative through hardship and trial, healing my soul even as my body lived with mental illness. By the time Pierce lost his job, my soul had been captured by a kinder story, one of a King whose yoke was easy and whose burdens were light. Faithfulness to God, for me, had become expectant. Hope-filled. A chance to wait on the Lord because I had finally learned to trust more of His character than my circumstances.
Still, it had been frightening to consider what our future would look like with no house and no job. Over those months, we had to face how much of our lives we’d entrusted to transient things. Pierce and I are privileged to have some shock absorption—family in the area, insurance, a 401(k)— but a running theme in our conversations was what we would do without those fallbacks. Time was running out. Could we trust in God because we had a few safety nets? Or could we trust in God even when nothing was left? To tell you the truth, we didn’t want to find out. So we told ourselves, and each other, that the Lord was good. He was good when Pierce had a job; He was good when he didn’t. We had nothing to hold onto but that.
And by the grace of a loving Father, it turned out to be enough.
Now we were answering questions like Are you still going to move? And we decided that our yes in those uncertain times remained a yes even now. The city had begun to wear on us after our previous move, when we left a quieter, walkable neighborhood for a location with a busy highway, perpetual construction, and heavy traffic. We wanted space to breathe, not just in our house, but in our whole lives.
Our new home would be a freshly-remodeled 1970s A-frame 900 square feet smaller than our current home, but with double balconies, a huge backyard, and Lucy’s elementary, middle, and high schools basically on our street. It’s outside the city, but still close enough to our church, and it’s less than an hour’s drive to my family. It’s also one street over from where my college bestie grew up and where her parents still live. When I saw the house pop up in my saved Zillow searches, my spirit leaped. That’s it, I said aloud to our bedroom. That’s our house. In another stroke of providence, the realtor selling it also turned out to be the investor who had flipped the house and we were her first and only prospective buyers. Within a few hours of our visit, she accepted our offer.
After we signed the papers, Pierce casually mentioned that our realtor had emailed over the closing date.
“It’s March 29th,” he said, as though his words weren’t a giant hallelujah chorus going off in my brain.
“Wait, what?!” I shouted, hopping up from the couch. “Babe, do you realize what day that is?”
“Uhh…Friday?” Pierce replied.
“It’s Good Friday,” I said, heart full to bursting. Pierce’s eyes went wide. “I told you that’s what He was going to do! Didn’t I tell you?!”
Then our house went on the market. We had twelve showings lined up by the very next day. Over the first weekend, there were more than thirty showings and many more the week after. None of them came with an offer.
I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more. Our house had never been this clean and I had never forgotten God’s goodness so fast in all my life. For two weeks, we had showings every.single.day. with nary a whisper in response. We live in a popular area of the city and our house was going for less than some of the other ranches in our neighborhood with half the space. By this point, we’d had more than fifty couples walk through our home and hosted three open houses. We were exhausted by the constant effort to keep the space in showing condition and the lack of response had us already questioning the wisdom of the move.
I felt silly, truth be told, and a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm. Maybe I heard God wrong? I’ll have to go tell everyone we aren’t moving after all and the Easter story was all made up in my head!
My ego is a fragile thing.
As Pierce was newly-employed, his greatest need had been met. He was providing for his family again and in a new role where the people were kind and the office was quiet. Whether we moved or not was of little concern to him anymore.
“Listen,” he told me, quite pointedly, “God provided for us at exactly the right time. If we stay or if we move, we already have what we need.”
It’s honestly rude how fast my husband resumed his role as the steady hand.
Still, I struggled to rein in my disappointment. At church that Sunday, our pastor Kris preached on Matthew 16, where Jesus revealed the coming of His death to His disciples. Peter, bless his exuberant heart, had the audacity to rebuke Jesus in response. He didn’t want his friend, much less His Savior, to die. Don’t say things like that! Peter told Jesus, horrified. Perhaps what Peter really meant was Don’t tell me I’ve been wrong all this time!
As I listened to Kris talk about laying down our expectations of how we think God should behave toward us, a phrase kept coming into my heart.
Easter is coming.
Yeah, duh, I thought.
Easter is coming.
Um…yes, Lord, I know.
Easter is coming.
…Oh.
Stay or go, new house or old, God was telling me You are loved. You are held. His promise remains the same today as it was two thousand years ago. If our circumstances are flipped are their heads…if what we hoped would come to fruition doesn’t…in the hands of the Living God, darkness brings forth life. It is His very best work, after all.
Following church that afternoon, I sat outside on our back porch, sipping coffee as the trees danced in the breeze and the birds called out their songs to one another. I looked out at our sunlit yard, already full of sweet memories after just two-and-a-half years, and suddenly felt a different yes forming within my heart.
Yes, Lord, I can stay here. Wherever You want us…wherever You go…I’ll go, too.
Later, I told Pierce this house had been a wonderful home for us and nothing about that fact had changed since he lost his job. If it was to indeed be the place where we spent the rest of our lives…well…that had been the plan all along anyway.
Two days later, we received our one and only offer.
It wasn’t easy going after that. Because of a number of issues on the buyer’s end, our closing date came and went twice. We celebrated Easter Sunday with the house half-packed, no longer sure if the move would even happen. I pouted and prayed for grace, even as the bad news and delays continued to ping our inboxes.
God has been good to us, Pierce reminded me. He will be good to us again.
On Easter Thursday, we sat on the couch and came to a decision: if we were delayed one more time, we would let the sale fall through. It would mean a lot of paperwork and hassle—school re-enrollment, unpacking, and lost deposits—but we would trust God. Stay or go, we prayed, please just make it clear before Monday.
The next afternoon, we got the all clear. We would close on both houses that Monday, April 8th—one week into Easter and one day after our daughter, Lucy, would be baptized at our home church into new life with Christ.
New beginnings, everywhere.
I can’t begin to know how the Lord works in the heart of every believer. But I know how He works in mine. I understand the world, and my experience of it, through story. If I could pen a novel for every major relationship I’ve had or write a memoir for every spiritual breakthrough, I would. It’s how I honor what God has revealed to me and it’s how I experience Him best. God is so faithful to us. He loves us so dearly and meets us right where we are, and I’m learning, year after year, to say yes to the story He’s writing in my life. In our lives. Sometimes the narrative is messy, and sometimes it hurts, but, like every great story, there is always redemption in the end.
One day, I got a wild hair and looked up the new house on Zillow to daydream. (As one does.) Scrolling through photos, I suddenly sensed there was something I needed to see and found myself searching for the property history, knowing the house had only recently been flipped.
As it turns out, it was bought by the realtor in October of 2023, the very same week Pierce lost his job.
And then it went right back on market the week he was hired at his new one.
All along, as we had prayed for God to make a way for our family out of the darkness, He was preparing for us a home.
I don’t know if we will live there forever. We’d like to think so, but we’ve learned to hold these things with open hands now. Even better, we’ve learned that God is exactly who we hoped He would be: a Giver of good gifts and a Father who writes better stories than I could ever dream.
In a few hours, we will say goodbye to one sweet, short chapter of our lives and hello to another beautiful, unexpected one. It wasn’t what we thought it would be, but it’s right on time.
And we are so, so grateful.
Easter is finally here.
We have a similar story to moving here. We came across the country from CA with no job, no family, no contacts--and with a depressed and suicidal adolescent. My husband FORGOT about an interview for a job because the previous owners of the house we bought had cats--and I am deathly allergic. He was trying to deal with new carpets. Three DAYS later he remembered. He called the guy back.. He hadn't filled the position yet. By the end of our second month, he had a job, our kids were settle in new schools, we had a church, and our daughter was a patient in what turned out to be the best outpatient facility in the country for her needs.
Absolutely beautiful 🥹. Congratulations on your beautiful new home!