We’ve been in the States long enough that plenty of people have been curious what comes next for us. The short answer is easy: we don’t really know! But there is a longer answer, too.
So we just arrived back in Virginia from Florida. We’re going to hang out here for a couple weeks until my aunt’s (belated) celebration of life, and then we’ll take our cat with us up to Los Angeles, where we’ll crash with some friends until we know how we’re getting to Japan.
Oh yeah, about that – our friend in Japan who said he was going to get us visas hasn’t seemed to pan out? We haven’t heard from him in months, so at this point we’re assuming that ship has sailed. If we do end up hearing from him again, great! But until then, we’re assuming God has some other plan in store for us.
By this point, our savings are starting to thin out, so unless we get a surprising lead very quickly, we’re going to have to get jobs – and once we have jobs, we’ll probably have to find somewhere to rent. It’s not impossible we find friends in LA we can rent a room from or something, but otherwise we’ll just look for somewhere cheap and crappy in LA, and if we can’t find that, we’ll look at going back to Virginia or Florida.
Some of you are reading this and laughing – “Somewhere cheap in LA? Fat chance of that!” But man, Los Angeles was so much cheaper for us to live in than Florida was. We were better off paying rent in Los Angeles than we were living in Bradenton rent-free. The rent is worse (and the places you get are smaller), but literally everything else is cheaper. I spent easily twice as much at the grocery stores in Florida, and for worse food.
Like, yeah, it’s worse now than it was when we left, but so is Florida. There’s nowhere cheap to live in the US anymore, that’s part of why we’re leaving. The only way things are easier for us in Virginia and Florida is that we have more family there that we can lean harder on.
But whatever, the moral of the story is God’s gonna find a way to make it work – and if he tells us to do it ourselves until we hear otherwise, we’ll find a way to manage. But God keeps reassuring me that we’re on a path that he’s set for us, so I’m not too worried about the future.