It was already too late. The words were out of my mouth. No matter how much I wanted to take them back the damage was already done.
“Are you serious?”
My friend was about to jump me. The conflict was unavoidable now. My poorly chosen words would lead to pain.
“Wow! You really want to help us move?”
I am talking about the kind of pain that comes when you spend an entire Saturday lifting heavy objects.
Packing a truck requires a certain talent. That is especially true when you’re making a long distance trek. My friend was about to move 15 hundred miles from Wilmington, North Carolina to the middle of the country. A journey like that requires a lot of planning. You need to be a visionary. Long before the first box is loaded your mind has to turn an empty space, 23 feet long by 8 feet wide, into a storage unit big enough to fit your entire life.
Luckily, my friend knows how to use every square inch of space. To him a moving truck is one giant jigsaw puzzle. He mastered a technique to stack boxes from floor to ceiling. When the gap become too narrow- he always found room for some thing else to fill the void; a rolled up rug, unpacked pillows or blankets, jackets that wouldn’t be needed until he arrived at his new home.
Each of the bigger items: the sofa, the bed, the dresser- were gently turned into vessels for other things. After carrying in a bookshelf my friend instantly started filling it with possessions. The dinner table was placed just like it was standing in the kitchen; its surface was then used as a foundation to stack more boxes. Even the more awkwardly shaped objects like the lawn mower, ceiling fans and golf clubs always had the perfect place waiting for their arrival the very moment they were carried inside.
The moving van became a testament to forethought; a shrine to the art of having a well designed plan and the endurance to execute it perfectly. All of it matches the very nature of my friend’s character. He lives his life the same way he packs a truck. He is, in short, a man with a plan.
From the moment he picked his career things have gone- more or less- the way they were supposed too. One precisely taken, intricate, step on the corporate ladder was always followed by another. The journey keeps moving forward (or upward) and his view gets more spacious with each step along the way.
The irony of it all, as I watched him in action; turning, rotating, negotiating even twisting boxes in places they had no business going; I realized that life rarely is like a moving truck. No matter how much preparation we do, sometimes things just don’t go as planned. All the pivoting and bending in the world- and you still can’t make everything fit.
The truth is my friend never wanted to leave Wilmington. When he moved here a few years ago it was with the hopes of establishing roots. This is where he was going to buy a house, find a church and become part of a community. His job was secure. So was his wife’s. Their future was promising. There was talk of promotions, raises and yes- maybe one day there’d even be a baby.
It just didn’t work that way.
Wilmington probably started going wrong for my friend earlier then he’d care to admit. He rented a nice home, but it was so far out of town that he had to endure an hour commute. When he arrived at work he often found not just genuine disagreements, but that his personality sometimes clashed with others.
As our Saturday went on, every so often in our conversation, my friend expressed pain and anger. A new job was waiting for him and yet he couldn’t quite let go of the one he had already quit. He wanted to talk about the way things should have been- if only it weren’t for a few unresolved issues
And yet I knew (and he knowa this too) that just because things don’t go according to out plan that doesn’t mean they don’t go exactly the way God has planned them.
You see, while my friend was dealing with all this change, his mother-in-law had concerns of her own. She was diagnosed with cancer. Coincidently my friend’s new job is only a few hours away from his wife’s hometown. If they left late tonight, and took two days to get there, they would literally be pulling up just as chemotherapy treatments were starting.
No, things didn’t go the way they were planned, not for my friend and certainly not for his in-laws. And yet a daughter being there to help her mother just seems to fit perfectly.
When the truck was finally loaded, and after we said our goodbyes, watching my friend drive away it became impossible not to smile. Yes he was leaving a place he wanted to stay, but I knew he was going exactly where he was supposed to be.
