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It takes courage to leave the places where we’ve had security.

Bron Williams • August 30, 2022

Can you wave surf?

I know my story is a familiar one.


As the result of my divorce, I lost my family home where I had been building a family for 28 years. Over that time, we’d moved a number of times so it wasn’t so much the house itself that I grieved but the sense of home that I missed so much.


A counsellor helped me uncover what ‘home’ meant for me – family – so in each of the houses I lived as a Salvation Army officer, I made sure there were lots of photos on the walls and covering my inherited sideboard so that, although my sons were grown, I was still surrounded by family and the house felt like home.


When I turned 60, I decided that I would say goodbye to the security I had with the Salvos – employment, housing and a car – to follow an unfulfilled dream. To be a professional speaker. But I had no home of my own so I registered with a house-sitting website, culled my possessions, and put most of what I owned in storage, keeping only my clothes and a couple of important personal items with me – including my family photos.



For the next three years, I looked after other people’s houses and pets – dogs and cats (of course), horses, turtles, goats, fish, chickens. I moved every 2 – 4 weeks, with stints at my mum’s place (she was in the last couple of years of her life) or in friends’ spare rooms. I very much enjoyed this gypsy lifestyle but I knew it was tenuous – I knew I was one of the hidden homeless because I had no secure home of my own to return to. 


And building a speaking and coaching business was hard in such an unsettled environment but I did speak in the US and picked up a number of clients. I also stared the reality of my own domestic violence experience in the face and came to grips with what it had meant for my life. And I had the unfathomable privilege of, with my sister and my brother and his wife, of seeing Mum through her final year of life, enabling her to live in her own home until the day before she died. 

A year or two before I left the Salvo I talked with God – as I was wont to do – and asked that I be taught how to wave surf. Not actually wave surf on the ocean, but wave surf on life so that I could surf whatever life threw at me, skimming the surface but delighting in the power of all that was moving beneath me. Looking back, the years after I left the security of my marriage (a toxic one but still secure in terms of having a home) and the years after I left the Salvos were wave-surfing years. I didn’t sink but there were lots of times when I was afraid.


It takes courage to step away from the places where we’ve had some form of security.


But despite the fear and the insecurity, I’ve found that those times of stepping away have yielded the greatest growth and opportunities only dreamed of. 

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