Upheaval.

It is, I guess, time to go public with the upheaval referred to in this post.

After six years in Edinburgh (eight, I think, in the case of my wife) we are preparing for a return to Northern Ireland. A very imminent return, actually. As in, in a month we’ll be there.

This is quite bizarre, as in the past we had been very certain that it was unlikely ever to happen. It’s one of those questions that people ask you all the time: “So when are you moving back?” The answer was always a dead simple, “Never.”

But now the house is sold and we both have new jobs to go to - I, for example, am returning to youth work, joining up with a church in a little town outside of Belfast as their Youth Development Worker. My time out from youth ministry has been great, and super in terms of recharging and getting ready for it again, but now I am ready to go.

This is all good.

The trouble is that Edinburgh is also good. We like it here. We have a lot of very good friends here. We are in no doubt that the move is the right thing (you can only cling on to those doubts for so long when everything goes as smoothly as it has, then it becomes very clear that these aren’t originally your plans that you’re working on :-), but that doesn’t mean we can go without a little bit of sadness.

So go we do, in but a few weeks.

Happy, sad, all at once. But that’s okay.