I am powerless to stop this. There is nothing I can do, in my own strength or of my own accord, to change what is happening. All I can change is how I respond to it.
I am utterly helpless.
The world would tell me that means I am hopeless, but God is telling me that this is exactly where I need to be so that He can show me something new.
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Knowing that we would one day be going on a long-term mission, we had planned on eventually renting/selling our home and narrowing down our belongings to only the most "important" things. We felt no sorrow or even stress about setting all of that aside to do what we felt called to do. But this... this was not what we expected. We weren't even considering doing any of that for a few years. Selling our home and getting rid of everything now was not what we had been hoping and praying for.
We were completely blindsided by this. For many weeks I felt like I was drowning. Breathing felt hard. Smiling was even harder. Joy seemed distant. For the first time in my life, hope felt so incredibly elusive. All I could do was cry out to God. I asked Him to forgive me in my unbelief, to help me to hope, to keep my heart focused on all that I am grateful for instead of wallowing in everything it felt like we were losing.
I can't tell you how many hours I spent trying to figure out what I could do to try and raise money, to increase our income, to dig us out of this mess. I started to rehash all of the shoulda, coulda, woulda, choices and mistakes, but what was the point? It wasn't going to help anything, it just left me feeling more like a failure and less like there was hope on the horizon.
At the same time, I was trying to figure out what step to take next. How do we go about selling our home? Can we refinance instead? Do we qualify to buy another home? Where are we going to live with rent being so high? How am I going to fix everything that needs to be fixed so I can even show this house? What about sorting and packing? How am I going to find the time to get all of this done while home schooling and still continuing our volunteer commitments?
We started considering stepping down from all of our commitments. With my husband working long hours, I will be doing the majority of the packing and prepping the house on my own, so we began to feel like we had to cut out everything else and just focus on this. Which, honestly, left me feeling more bleak about the foreseeable future.
I didn't want every second of my life to be consumed with just this. I wanted to keep those things that bring joy and fulfillment.
We had also been discussing our financial plan for the immediate future with some people whose wisdom and advice we deeply respect. The plan was to save every penny we could. That meant cutting as much spending as possible, including any additional charitable giving we were doing on top of our tithing. We don't give much above tithing because there isn't much to give, but we didn't want to commit to not giving if God put it on our hearts to do so.
In both of these these things, serving and giving, we felt conflicted. There were pros to stopping both, but what weighed more heavily on our hearts was were we following God's plan?
We prayed and asked God what we were supposed to do about our Community Group that meets at our house once a week. We didn't want to quit, this was something God had called us to do and He hadn't told us to stop. Yet, we didn't want to just up and abandon them the moment the house sold. So, we asked God if it was time to set the group aside. While others were telling us that maybe we need to do less, we are trying to do too much, we asked God and we heard one word... "stay".
What did that mean? Were we supposed to keep leading the group? How were we going to make that commitment and have our home available to show?
On top of all of this there is Christmas. The holidays are coming and instead of spending time as a family enjoying the season, and possibly our last Christmas in the only home our kids remember, we were going to be sorting out what things mattered enough to put them in storage and getting rid of the rest.
I was burned out and at the end of my ability to figure anything out.
So, we prayed about it. We asked for direction. And He answered.
The grace of God met me there, in that place of exhaustion and confusion...
God is a good Father. He doesn't leave us alone and afraid, or wandering aimlessly. He sends us little reminders of His love and lets us know that He is with us and that His plans for us are good.
A woman of incredible faith came over to us at church, moments after I had been praying and asking God to help me; to show me what to do. She told us that God knows. That He has seen our hearts to serve others. That we give, of our time, our talents, out of what we have and even what we don't have. That we have done everything we could, creatively and with our own ability, to bring income into our home. He said that we are to continue to serve, to continue to give, even out of our lack, and that was where He would bless us. He said it was time for us to rest in letting Him bring income to our family. It was no longer our burden.
I can't tell you how much I needed to hear this from Him. His timing was perfect.
I felt peace and hope for the future for the first time since we made this decision. Just knowing these two simple things, that we were to keep serving and giving, gave me some sense of direction and that gave me a measure of peace in the unknown.
Hearing Him say that we have done all we could and that we were released from the burden of having to "make the finances better" took so much pressure off of our shoulders.
He knew that we tried. He knew that we did our best. He wasn't disappointed with us. He was giving us a break. He was letting us rest in His hands while He takes care of the next part.
For the first time in weeks, I don't feel like I'm being crushed under the weight of this thing. For the first time I don't feel overwhelmed.
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