We both looked at each other and said, “Give it away.”
We didn’t mean “give it away” in the sense of philanthropy, but in recognizing that this money wasn’t ours. It was owed to others. So we sat down and wrote out $100,000 worth of checks. We were completely broke again within a week, but everybody got paid. Every bill was up to date. With that check, we were able to buy ourselves another month or so of time to get back on our feet. It’s sad looking back, because even with a miracle like that, we still had our doubts.
We both realized quickly thereafter that this was no fluke. It had been the story of our life together, ever since we’d met. From the very beginning, I feel like we had encountered miracle after miracle that allowed us to get by and survive. Now it was happening on a much bigger scale—in hundred-thousand-dollar increments. But maybe we should have been paying more attention to those little miracles all along. We were now both out on that limb, and we looked up and saw God right there with us.
Somehow we were always wily enough to get ourselves out of a financial pickle by finding the money from somewhere. Or so I’d thought. But this was not us being “wily.” This couldn’t be anything but the grace of God.
Did those earlier “breaks” come from the same source?
Getting that $100,000 check just made us open our eyes and see that whenever we’d needed a break, when a house would sell or rent would come through just in the nick of time—God was there orchestrating. We were just so overwhelmed with all this.
Maybe getting to the bottom all those times, and especially that time, was some sort of a test. A test of will maybe, a test of faith, a test of our resolve to stay the course in following our dreams and to do the right thing when it came to how we treated others. I don’t know.
What I do know, looking back on it now, is that all of these big, life-changing things were right around the corner for us at that moment. And if we’d given up, if we’d walked away, if we’d crumbled when we were at our lowest, we never would have made it around the corner to see all of the blessings that were about to come due.
THIRTEEN
SURVIVING OR THRIVING
I’m not sure what it was about moving into that little shotgun of a house that brought so many revelations to the surface. But right in the middle of our financial crisis, I had yet another awakening—a true lightbulb moment, just as I’d had when I decided to design our living space for us. And this new revelation was also sparked by the laughter of my children down the hall.
I’d managed to put that house together in a way that made my family happier than perhaps we’d ever been. We all had space to be ourselves and to be together, even though this home was half the size of our previous one. The only problem I seemed to keep running into in that smaller space was that there just wasn’t enough room to keep all our stuff contained. Even though the kids had their own living room, everything still seemed to spill out everywhere all the time.
I was still working hard to make this house perfect, which to me meant not only giving it some character and bringing it to life, but also keeping it clean and uncluttered. And it seemed as if all day, every day, I spent most of my time picking up after the kids, yelling at them whenever they spilled a glass of milk, then mopping the floors one more time. It was exhausting.
I was finally taking a moment for myself one afternoon, plopping down on our old sofa with the new slipcover, when I made the mistake of looking down. My beautiful, brand-new, snowy-white slipcover was covered in little black fingerprints. I mean, there were fingerprints everywhere.
I looked up and noticed that the whole house was messy again—a shoe here, a sock there, a pile of toys on the coffee table. I had already spent half the day cleaning. And everything in me wanted to stand up and go yell at those kids for not washing their hands like I’d told them to a thousand times. I also started yelling at myself in my mind: What mother in her right mind would buy white slipcovers for a sofa with four little kids in the house? I mean, really. White? I was so mad at myself and the kids that I was just about to lose it.
Then I heard the kids down the hall.
They were playing in one of the bedrooms, and the whole lot of them erupted in laughter over some silly thing. Their giggles were so full of joy. The sound of their little voices pierced my heart.
I looked back down at all of those tiny fingerprints on my white slipcover, and I realized something surprising: Someday I might actually miss those little fingerprints.
Right then and there, I knew I had been focused on the wrong things. And I realized I had a choice to make.
I could go in there and yell, ruining their little moment and then having to spend another hour of my life trying to clean up the mess that they’d made. Or I could choose to let it go. I could go play with my kids and maybe get a chance to share in that laughter right alongside them.
So what if my house wasn’t perfect?
It was perfect just the way it was.
I realized that my determination to make things perfect meant I was chasing an empty obsession all day long. Nothing was ever going to be perfect the way I had envisioned it in the past. Did I want to keep spending my energy on that effort, or did I want to step out of that obsession and to enjoy my kids, maybe allowing myself to get messy right along with them in the process?
I chose the latter—and that made all the difference.
This revelation was so much more than a lightbulb turning on in my head. I felt as if a hundred pounds got lifted off my shoulders that afternoon. I remember sitting there on that sofa going, “Holy cow. I can breathe.”
It all came down to a mind shift in which I asked myself, “What am I going for in life?” Was it to achieve somebody else’s idea of what a perfect home should look like? Or was it to live fully in the perfection of the home and family I have?
My revelation wouldn’t mean that I would never clean my house again. It wouldn’t even keep me from throwing that slipcover in the washing machine—eventually. My kids do tend to play better and act better in a clean environment, and Chip appreciates a clean home too. My family inspires me to want to keep our home clean for them, and I personally can’t think straight in an environment that’s too cluttered. And yet the time I spend with my kids is worth far more than the time I spend cleaning.
Right then and there, I made up my mind to stop cleaning the house during the day. If that meant I had to stay up an extra forty-five minutes at night doing dishes or cleaning up the living room after the kids were in bed, then so be it. I also vowed to set up better storage systems and to teach the kids that everything had a place. But I wasn’t going to obsess about any of that. Not anymore.
That day changed me. It really did. And I quickly found that my shift in mind-set had a positive effect on our life together. Now when someone spills a glass of milk, I don’t worry so much about the mess. Instead, I try to focus on my relationship with the one who spilled the milk.
I still have my bad days, believe me, when I see that milk for the mess that it is and I yell, “Oh, come on!” I get mad. I’m not perfect. But I recognize now that yelling is always the lesser of two options. The better option is to use that moment to teach them, “Well, you know what? I did that when I was a kid too. We all make mistakes.” Followed by, “How about you help me clean this up?”