Plot twist
No, we’re not pregnant. Just getting it out there right at the start since I’m conscious that I’ve deployed a provocative title for something written by a young newly married woman.
But we do have updates.
Context
A few days ago, I turned down a full-time job offer for a tenure track position as an Old Testament professor at a Christian undergraduate institution (staying anonymous).
Instead, we’re moving to Jerusalem this summer, Lord willing.
Here’s the background: Currently teaching as an adjunct professor at various graduate schools this academic year, I decided with Isaac in the autumn that I would apply to various full-time job postings that were emerging at Christian institutions in the US. I was craving a home community for teaching ministry and scholarship, ready to transition away from the relative solitariness of my digital nomad teaching life. Isaac was ready to quit his finance job and follow me if I was hired. So I underwent the labor-intensive process of crafting detailed portfolios for a number of schools and started advancing in search processes. Then I made it all the way to the end at my top choice school, received an offer… and one week later, declined.
We’ve decided to move to the Middle East within one year of marriage, which will be the second international move for me within 13 months.
What led to our embracing of this bold option was a complex set of variables related to aligning our respective vocations within our marriage. While Isaac has been working in finance for the last five years, we could tell for months that he was likely approaching a pivot away from finance and toward formal academic study of Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament and Jewish backgrounds to the New Testament (typically called “Rabbinics”). Isaac has devoted innumerable hours outside of the workday for the past several years to acquire text and language skills for navigating the vast corpus of rabbinic literature. He’s passionate about it, exceptionally gifted at it, and capable of making quite a specific and useful teaching contribution. Now add to that picture the fact that reputable Rabbinics programs are fairly concentrated in New York and Israel and generally not suited for remote learning.
Doors for Isaac to study Rabbinics in the States seemed to be swinging closed while I was simultaneously progressing toward landing a full-time job. As we sensed how geographically and logistically complicated our situation was becoming, we agreed that cohabitation would be a minimum requirement within our marriage right now—i.e., arrangements that would require us to live in different primary locations for substantial periods of time were off the table.
What were we to do? So arose in late January our entertaining of the somewhat outlandish suggestion that we could throw all conventional wisdom about the academic job market in the US to the wind and turn down an offer if it came so that we could live in Jerusalem for several years.
Having three to four years in Jerusalem would allow Isaac to complete extensive coursework (in modern Hebrew, by the way) at Hebrew University, probably the best school in the world for his precise academic interest. He would come out with a robust MA and possibly start a flexible PhD, much better equipped for a lifetime of continued study and teaching.
On my end, Israel life would look like taking a postdoctoral position (an institutional platform for continued research and writing post-PhD) at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, continuing adjunct teaching in the States and elsewhere, and attempting to acquire some modern Hebrew. (Since many may wonder, knowing how to read the Old Testament in Hebrew certainly does not automatically equip one to be conversant in Hebrew on the ground in Israel!)
As events unfolded, I received the official offer for the job the day before we happened to leave for a trip to Tel Aviv to spend time with Isaac’s family there. We managed to visit Jerusalem over that weekend and had a couple of key conversations. A few days later, we committed to Jerusalem, and the arduous process of discernment ended.
And then, less than twelve hours before we were supposed to leave from Tel Aviv to return to the States (having already moved our flight up by two days), the US and Israel struck Iran with an air attack. Israel closed its airspace in anticipation of counter-attack from Iranian drones and missiles, and we’re now ducking into the shelter in our Airbnb every time that the sirens go off—it’s been frequent. We’re still here, shifting plans, praying for the people of Iran, Israel, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and waiting to fly out.
Reflection
As I reflect on the past several weeks of decision-making, I am especially struck by how quiet God’s leading often seemed.
Now we feel peace and confidence in the decision—even with the recent escalation in hostilities between Israel and Iran—but for weeks we vacillated every couple of days, not always in the same direction at the same time. Then when the job offer actually arrived, we both sat at 50/50 for days, with only a week to decide. Our dominant descriptor of this period of discernment has been “heavy,” as we’ve experienced the odd form of tension that arises when two good open doors present themselves—and stay open.
Though we could readily acknowledge the objective abundance of riches implicit in the choice before us, we felt the heaviness of trying to weigh the values, dreams, and fears that inevitably emerge when making this kind of decision, trying to figure out which to heed and which to release. We earnestly desired to choose faithfully and prudently, knowing that there’d be benefit as well as risk and cost through either door. Moreover, just about seven months into marriage we were encountering our first significant decision as a unit, feeling the implications of the life-joining to which we’ve covenanted. We felt keenly the need to steward not only our own sense of calling (insofar as we can currently identify it) but also to champion the other’s.
So we threw ourselves into the normal hard work of discernment: praying, having lots of long and searching conversations, seeking counsel from a wide array of people, and gathering as much information as we could regarding what might be possible for each of us in both locations.
Here’s why I remark on God’s apparent quiet throughout the process: at many points it felt to me like we had all the difficult forms of clarity coupled with uncertainty in all the areas that we would’ve appreciated resolution.
Clear enough to us was just how trajectory-setting this decision could be. I remarked to Isaac that often in life people are ignorant of the fact that they’re on the cusp of what will turn out to be a watershed moment (e.g., when I agreed to be the TA for a seminary class in which I happened to meet my future husband). In this case, we were almost painfully aware of how choosing one direction or another would shape our development, relationships, and opportunities for years to come. Related to the latter, we were also conscious of how bold it would be for me to turn down a full-time job in the States right out of my PhD after hearing for years just how abysmal the job market is in the States if you happen to have an advanced degree in biblical studies. There was and is no guarantee of a comparable offer on the other side of a stint in Israel. Since the costs and discomforts of both scenarios—the safer, more conventional US option vs. the more audacious Israel option—so directly confronted us, we started finding it helpful to pray about and consider which kinds of risk and difficulty we should listen to, and which we should step into with the expectation of growth.
Ironically complementing these hard forms of clarity was a stubborn uncertainty about how to arrive at resolution. Unlike in previous “big decision” situations, we experienced no clear door-slamming to which we could appeal as evidence of God’s narrowing down options and choosing for us. As we sought counsel from others, most people were thoroughly supportive and judiciously un-opinionated in terms of telling us which door to choose. We (especially I) wrestled up until the day before an official answer was due to the school, and still we would describe ourselves as “at least 70/30”—not “absolutely 100”—in leaning Jerusalem over the US option. I started asking God to help us discern which lingering uncertainties about either scenario should be deterrents and which should be let go, assured that while our understanding would always remain partial, the God going before us and with us knows.
At several points in my restlessness for resolution and weariness with the tension in which we were suspended, I found it natural to start thinking: “Alright, God: now would be the time for the flashing lights and neon signs, right? Surely you won’t hang us out to dry, leaving us bewildered to the end and reluctantly forced to make an arbitrary choice? Now would be the time for the obviously closed door, right?” And yet those two tantalizing and mutually exclusive doors remained ajar on either side of us.
Despite the resounding witness of the Scriptures to God’s expert guidance of his children, in the vulnerability of unknowns and risks, how capable we are of beginning to assume that God might be playing hide-and-seek or simply apathetic about our circumstances. Perhaps you can resonate.
In our case, we might wonder: Why did God sequence events and information as he did? Why did the situation remain so unclear for so long, such that we only discovered all the complexity latent in accepting a stateside job after I had expended so much time and energy in applications and was months into the interview process at multiple schools, feeling increasingly invested?
I suspect that we’ll never know the entirety of the answers to those questions. And I suspect that we don’t need to know it.
I’m reminded of the exodus route of the Israelites when leaving Egypt after 400 years of slavery. There was a coastal highway along the Mediterranean that could’ve taken them efficiently from Egypt straight to Canaan in the space of days or weeks. Instead, God led them on a years-long circuitous path through the formidable Sinai wilderness—an environment that looked like certain death to a sprawling group of former slaves draped with livestock and young children.
God, however, apparently doesn’t have the same fixation on efficiency that we have, nor is he inhibited by the same calculus of cost and limitation that drives us. His objectives are much more directed toward the coming of his kingdom than the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to get from Point A to Point B. He didn’t even find it necessary to give the Israelites a comprehensive map of their journey before they set out.
Rather than leading his people on the shorter route that they undoubtedly would’ve deemed obvious, God knew better. He knew that his people would encounter war prematurely on that convenient coastal highway and go slinking back to Egypt (Exod 13:17). And he also knew that the wilderness would be the right context to forge his people’s trust in their God as utterly reliable and therefore worthy of their utter allegiance (Deut 8:1–10). The wilderness was prime territory to form that character in his people before they would eventually face battle to inherit the promised land, with all odds stacked against them but God going with them and for them.
So God’s wilderness route for his people may not have been obvious or straightforward or even palatable from their vantage point, but it was precisely right from God’s vantage point and therefore ultimately, deeply good.
As my beloved grandmother regularly quips, “happiness is being where Jesus wants you.” At end of day, the categorically best place to be is firmly on the path of God’s will. Rather than a one-time decision to attach oneself to predetermined railroad tracks which can then be passively followed, walking in God’s will is often like hiking in thick fog or meandering through a desert, requiring constant listening for God’s voice, continual realigning to his value system, and always obedient responsiveness to whatever particular expressions of God’s will that he asks of his particular children at a given time, however surprising or mundane or stretching.
Far from apathetic about the affairs of our lives, God is supremely opinionated about the coming of his kingdom in the hearts of his servants and in the entirety of the cosmos. He’s much less interested in leading us on an opaque scavenger hunt than readying and releasing his people for participation in the arrival of that kingdom. As another wise mentor has encouraged me, “It’s God will if you do God’s will once you’re there.”
Jerusalem, here we come.
