I was not exactly looking forward to our family’s sabbatical in Berkeley, California. Our five-month sojourn was a year-and-a-half in the planning, so my mind had plenty of time to run through every nightmarish scenario imaginable. I worried that we couldn’t possibly find a comfortable and affordable home for a family of six. I worried that I would be stuck in this uncomfortable and expensive home all day long with four bickering children and no breaks. I worried that I would miss our life back in Vermont and become depressed.

Yet, even as I worried about these things, here’s how I expected the narrative to unfold: We would arrive in Berkeley, and everything would be fine! All of my worries would prove unfounded, and – as has happened repeatedly in the past – I would say, “I don’t know why I worried so much!”

Imagine my surprise, then, when in fact everything I’d worried about came true – and then some! A few weeks into our sabbatical, not only was I depressed, missing Vermont, and stuck all day in a cramped and expensive rental home with four bickering children, I’d also been blindsided by unexpected setbacks. I hadn’t expected to fracture my foot on our second day in California. I hadn’t expected my husband and children to miss Vermont as much as I did. I hadn’t expected to find the Bay Area – where we’d lived for five years – infinitely more challenging than I remembered because we were no longer used to city life and lines and traffic. I hadn’t expected our California friends to be so very, very busy that it would take months to see some of them.

“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” I told my husband tearfully. “I worried, so everything was supposed to work out.”

It took nearly the full five months for me to realize that sabbatical was an enormous gift to our family.

Click here to continue reading about the lessons I learned from our sabbatical in this week’s “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical” column in The Addison Independent. (This will be the FINAL California edition of this column — actually filed from Oregon, where our family is on vacation before heading back to Vermont!)