He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.” Psalm 46:10
I’ve led a charmed life. Not an extravagant or indulgent life. But, through a gift of fate, I was born into this wonderland in which I’ve lived. I’ve never had to worry about having what I need. I’ve always been good at most of what I try. My family is well respected and my relationships have always been functional and unencumbered. I’ve always heard other people share their testimonies and been a bit envious, if that’s even possible, that they had such great stories to tell of God’s faithfulness. My walk with the Lord had been so easy, so formulaic, albeit sincere, that my testimony seemed like a cliché to me. Little did I know that I was only young and yet unscathed by the suffering of this life. God was about to write a new chapter into my testimony.
When I’m in emotional pain, I disassociate. I talk about other things. I focus on anything good I can find; laugh at whatever I can. Some people talk about, or write about, their pain amidst their time of trial. They find it cathartic. I don’t. Not that I shouldn’t. I just don’t.
In the midst of something painful, I find it very difficult to have enough perspective to put my pain into words. For me, deep pain requires such intense focus, that I have no energy for analysis. I find I must be just on the other side of a painful situation in order to be able to look back at it and make sense of it all. I stand at that place now.
This is my attempt, before Time hits it like a wave and washes away all I’ve learned and all God has done, to put on paper the events of the last 18 months lest I forget the vast faithfulness of The Lord.
The great unraveling began on the front side of 2009. The bottom dropped out of the market-The housing market, the stock market, the job market. My husband’s business, which he operated with his brother, was losing its wheels. In the previous 2 years the business had grown tremendously and had 13 full time employees. Sales were pouring in and because of that we were oblivious to the iceberg we were about to hit. Overnight, our sales dropped 60 percent. We’d grown so fast that we were never properly capitalized. And once we realized that the drop in sales was not simply a bad month, but the start of an economic drought, we didn’t know how to backpedal fast enough.
We went through 5 years of personal savings in just a few payroll periods trying to uphold our obligations to our employees and vendors. Our partners, my husband’s brother and sister-in-law, also put a huge amount of their personal resources into trying to get the company back on track. For a while, we borrowed anywhere we could to try to shore up our hemorrhaging business. That was a mistake. Never throw good money after bad. We needed to stop the bleeding, but that meant cutting everyone we’d hired. And these weren’t just people who’d responded to want ads, these were lifelong friends. There are still relationships that are broken, and I don’t know if I’ll get to see them all repaired.
From about the late spring on, my husband couldn’t bring home a penny from his company. There was simply nothing to take. We scrounged. He did work on the side. I cleaned houses and babysat, but we weren’t even coming close to getting by.
As my husband watched his ability to provide for his family slip through his fingers, he also watched how his wife handles fear. I grasp for intense control over everything around me. I scrutinize all actions past and present. I judge. I rage.
During this time of financial undoing, my husband’s health was also deteriorating. Most people couldn’t tell. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t complain about it. But I knew that there was something hunting him… Something that was just below the surface waiting for the chance to swallow him up.
The monster finally came for him. We were up in Flagstaff trying to enjoy a respite with my parents and siblings at a friend’s cabin, when it all finally hit the fan. He was in intense pain, he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and was spiking fevers that weren’t responding to medication. I didn’t want him to go to the Emergency room in Flagstaff, because the out-of-network expense would be so great. He’d been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease about 10 before ago and since then can only qualify for high deductable insurance. The out-of-network deductable was $40,000 dollars (in network was $25,000). Shame on me for putting that frightening number above the welfare of my husband.
By the time we got him down to Phoenix, he was terribly sick. He had an abdominal abscess that was eating him alive inside. He ended up being in the hospital for a month and had a massive surgery to remove a portion of his large intestine in order to extricate the infection.
The day he went into the hospital, we had $10 in the checking account, no savings and no credit left to extend. Our parents helped us stay afloat by paying some of our bills, but I didn’t know how it would end. I didn’t know if I would still have a husband when it all was done. It was one thing to have a sense that this was a short hiccup that we would come out of soon, but as the days turned into weeks, I knew we needed a longer term stop-gap measure. My parents would’ve never let us go hungry, but I was too proud to really tell them how bleak our situation was. They’d already given us so much, I couldn’t bring myself to ask for more.
I’ll never forget the day that I Googled the words “emergency food banks Arizona.” As a result of no income, and rising medical care costs, I applied for food stamps and state funded Medicaid. I’d always been judgmental of people who were on welfare. Now it was me who needed it. The shame I felt for needing the help which I’d derided others for receiving in the past was excruciating.
(The girls laying in Daddy’s hospital bed the day before they left for their trip to Texas.)
I spent almost all my waking hours at the hospital. My parents graciously cared for our children and took them on a 2 week trip to Texas with them. It was during that trip that I was finally able to bring my recovering husband home from the hospital. That first night laying in bed with him after a month of loneliness, I could feel every bone in his body. He was but a skeletal shadow of himself. It was that night that the floodgates of gratefulness opened and I thanked God for letting me keep the love of my life. We went on a short day trip up north to celebrate the fact that he had not been consumed. We stopped at a place on the mesas of the high desert called “Sunset Point.” We’d timed it to be at the observation deck right at sundown.
I sat on the bench next to my husband and held his boney hand as the hot July winds washed over us. We watched a spectacular Arizona sunset, and that’s when the God who painted the sky that night, and every night, spoke into my mind, “Be still. Be still and know that I am God.”
(Sunset Point- My husband was so thin here, that he and I are actually the same weight in this photo.)
My husband’s health steadily returned, but our business was a breath away from death. It was in critical condition before he spent a month in the hospital. Now it was on the bleeding edge. I don’t know why we didn’t quit. People smarter than us probably would have. If it had been entirely up to me we would have. But we kept coming back to the fact that our clients were overwhelmingly pleased with the results of their projects, and that even though it was less demand than before, there were still people who wanted what we had to offer. We knew we either had to work to pay off the business’s debts by doing projects and putting all the proceeds toward debt repayment, or we (and our partners) would incur all of the debt personally.
Meanwhile, we slowly began to accept the reality that the perfect financial storm was at our doorstep. Slashed income, no savings, maxed credit and unspeakable hospital bills had come calling, and it was time to face the rain. We crunched numbers, we hoped for some sort of theoretical solution to our problems that we could work towards, but it didn’t come. We spoke with some trusted financial advisors and they confirmed that we were going to lose our house. It would either short sale or foreclose, but we would lose it either way.
Still, I refused to face one of my greatest financial fears: losing my home. In hindsight, I think losing our home was the ultimate fear because it’s the one thing that you can’t hide. You can go through bankruptcy quietly, and no one has to know. You can be riddled with debt and struggling to make ends meet, and no one has to be the wiser. But losing your home…that’s as public as a parade. So, I avoided the inevitable, convinced that if we strived hard enough, we could make it work. We could find a way. But, when I prayed, the only answer I got from God was “Be still.”
I remember feeling my emotional pain physically; ending every night with a headache that matched the ache in my heart, the shame of my heart. We had become like “those people” who’d made poor financial choices and now had to bear that disgrace in the form of a “For Sale” sign in our front yard. In a real estate market like ours, everyone knew what that meant. I was consumed with the idea that we’d failed and when I shouted into the emptiness of my despair there was only the echo, “Be still.”
One day, when I was out running errands, it hit me that I’d already faced one of my greatest fears in the illness of my husband. The mountain of fear that I had of losing him had no effect on the outcome. It only affected me. It only crippled me. Yet, despite my fear, God reigned. I realized that the only choice I had in any given situation was whether or not I was going to let my fear have the power.
I called my husband from my cell phone and said four words, “I’m not afraid anymore.”
I was starting to be still.
The pain didn’t diminish, it merely had a light behind it. It was still a raw and searing pain. We’d decided to pursue a short sale on our home, but just the costs of keeping our utilities on and maintaining our property was more than we could afford, let alone the mortgage payment. We made the decision that we must move out while we worked with the bank in the short sale process.
The day we left, I walked through the empty rooms of my home and ran my hands over the walls that I’d lovingly painted. I touched the floor boards and remembered how I’d helped my husband lay each one. I saw the spot on the carpet in the girls’ room where my rocking chair sat for so many years and how I’d nursed and comforted my babies there. I lingered in the master bedroom where, newly married at 20 and 22, my husband and I started our love affair. This home where we’d laughed together, loved together, wept together and grown up together was about to become a memory; a page in a book yet unwritten. “Being still” hurt deeply.
According to Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible, the words “Be still” that are used in Psalms 46:10 are translated from the Hebrew word raphah which means, to cause to fall; let go. All those times I cried out to God and He answered “be still” He was really saying, “Let go, Karis. I’m causing you to fall so you’ll trust me.”
Let go…I had to acknowledge that I couldn’t control all the outcomes in my life. I couldn’t work hard enough, strive long enough, or be wise enough to avoid all the suffering that life would dish out. I had to let go and know that He is God. And once I did, I discovered that there is something very freeing in having nothing left to lose.
All the while, God was working. For the same amount that we were paying for our current utilities, He provided a place for us to live that was bigger than our house, and included most of our utilities. We were prepared to live anywhere that we had to in order to get our expenses below our means. We figured that would be meager. Instead, it was a villa at a beautiful resort complete with a lake view and a luxurious pool. On top of that, anonymous givers at our church were helping us make ends meet with money, food and gift cards. The very definition of grace is getting more than you deserve.
An inch at a time, my husbands business was picking up. I went back to work full-time and had a salary that we could (almost) live on. Inch by inch, our business was knocking out debt. Nothing comes easy. Being poor is exhausting. But we found we were just as happy, maybe happier, with renting someone else’s house than we were in ours. Our holidays were just as festive, our family memories just as precious as in our life as homeowners. When I finally let go, the joy of the Lord rose up to meet me.
The millstone around our necks was our house. It still sat lonely and vacant. Until there was some conclusion, we couldn’t hit the reset button. We learned that the short sale process is anything but “short.” We learned things about the secret inner-workings of the financial markets that will forever alter how we invest our money. We learned that loss to a bank really means “less gain.”
What a roller coaster the sale of our house was. We had secured 6 different sets of buyers that had submitted contracts to our bank that had either been flat-out denied, or who backed out in the 11th hour. And then last week, 15 months after we placed it up for sale, it quietly and unceremoniously closed escrow.
We met the new buyers the day that we went to get a few remaining belongings out of the garage. They were there to take some measurements. Nice people. He served the country in Iraq and now works for the postal service, she’s a flight attendant and they have an adorable 3 year old daughter. We made light small talk, answered a few of their questions and introduced them to a few neighbors.
On the outside I was cordial and cheerful. On the inside it hurt to see our house, burden that it was, being inhabited by strangers. Someone else’s child playing with her doll as she sat in the middle of the kitchen floor that I’d scrubbed, on my hands and knees, countless times.
As we drove away, I expected to feel some sort of relief. But we’d been holding our breath for so long we’d forgotten how to exhale. Yet, there He was again, breathing into my spirit, “Be still, daughter. I’m working. Let go.”
This side of eternity is like looking at the backside of a tapestry. All we see is the knotted chaos of threads and scraps. We can’t see the beautiful work of art that’s on the other side. But every once in a while, if we’re willing to see it, God gives us a tiny glimpse of His grand design. That happened this last Sunday as I was getting ready to pull out of our church parking lot.
We’d attended the first service that morning and were leaving to go to a birthday party. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them, the buyers of our house walking towards the church with their daughter. I stopped the car, rolled down the windows and called out their last name as loud as I could. I’d seen their last name so many times on the documents that we’d signed, but their first names escaped me. They turned and spotted me and I said awkwardly, “It’s me, Karis! You bought my house!”
As we talked in the church parking lot, they told me that they had been attending the church about 6 weeks and it had been recommended by their cousin. Somehow in that time we’d never met. Of all the millions of people in the city, of all the thousands of churches, they went to ours. As I’m known to do, I decided to be disarmingly honest with them. I said, “Can I tell you something that might make you uncomfortable? I wanted to tell you before, but didn’t want to be weird, but now that we’re going to be seeing each other more, I can’t escape it.” They looked at me, eyebrows raised and reluctantly nodded.
I took the woman’s hand gently and said, “I don’t know where you’re at with the Lord, but I’ve been praying for you for 15 months. From the day that we listed our house for sale and knew that we were going to have to leave, I’ve prayed that God would give the house to a family who would love it as much as we have. I prayed that they would be good people that loved Him and that could pick up where we left off being hometown missionaries to our neighborhood. You were the seventh set of buyers on our home. God was saving it for you.”
This man and woman, who were all but strangers, embraced me, thanked me and told me the story of how God had brought them half way across the country, to a place where they knew no one. They told me about how the moment that they first walked through our house they knew it was supposed to be their home. They said that they were excited to show the love of Christ to their new neighbors. And in that moment, the pain of the last year-and-a-half seemed worth it.
What Satan meant for evil, God meant for good. He’d taken us down to the depths so we could hear Him. He’d caused us to fall so we would let go. Stillness is a constant discipline, one that I’ll always be learning. I just hope that our story brings comfort to those who are hurting, and gives hope to those who are still letting their fear have the power. Be still and know that He is God. It’s in the stillness that you’ll finally be free.
Guys, in case you haven’t gotten your special lady anything to celebrate your love yet… Here’s a list for you. If you have purchased a gift and you happen to see it on the following list, this night is not going to go well for you.
