My name is Amy and for the past three years I’ve been a realtor.

I enjoyed real estate and I was relatively good at it. I like meeting new people and the challenge of finding them the right home was exciting. When I first started, I always asked myself if I could do it. After three years, my question changed from ‘can I do this?’ to ‘do I actually want to do this’?  I spent a lot of time, energy and money in building a real estate business but was no longer sure if this was something I wanted to continue to pursue as a career.  I realized that the thing I loved the most about real estate was helping people ---not necessarily selling real estate.  ... I think a lot of people get trapped in a business or company that doesn’t excite them anymore. And so many people find it hard to walk away from a sure thing – especially when you’ve invested time, energy and money into it. Where’s that line between quitting and making a smart choice?

Last year, I was at a leadership conference when the speaker asked a question that would change my life.

He said, “If you knew what you know now when you started out in your business, would you still do it?” And as soon as he asked the question, I knew the answer: absolutely not!  But I had no idea what to do with that.

I have a personal relationship with God and so I started to pray.  I asked him what I should do and over the course of a few months, the answer became clear.

Clear, but not easy. God was asking me to leave my career.

Trusting Him with this was hard.  I wasn’t sure if I should stick it out or move on to something else. I didn’t want to give up. That’s not something we do in my family. It’s not the Buhler way. We don’t quit.

The idea of walking away from a career without a back-up plan was terrifying. It felt completely irresponsible.

I remember writing the email to all my clients telling them that I would no longer be their realtor. I scheduled the email to go out when I knew I had a meeting with a client because I was so nervous about what people would say. I didn’t know what to expect.

People were surprised when they heard, but they wished me well. It was hard to set aside other people’s expectations of me. I didn’t think my identity was tied to my career, but when I stepped away from my career I started to see that it was.

At the time I didn’t know what God was doing, just that he was asking me to trust him. Now I know that if I hadn’t left my career I probably wouldn’t have met my husband.

It wasn’t easy trusting God when I couldn’t see where things were going. But God was putting all the pieces in place setting me up for a life I could not have imagined. Now I’m getting ready for a new life in a new city – something that would have been harder to say yes to if I was committed to a career here. I’m so excited to marry Mark and begin our life together. I can’t wait to see what God has in store for us.