Sharing this story is going to be very hard for me. I'm a very private person, and I would love to keep it to myself. But how do you avoid doing what God has asked when all you want to do is keep it under wraps. The answer is you simple can't avoid it. If you have a true relationship with Jesus Christ, it would be hard to not heed his voice. Lon and I went through a really rough patch in our marriage about six years ago, and God told me in the mist of it that it would be our testimony.
There would be times when I prayed and heard God speak to me, prodding and convicting me to write it down and share it with others. Every time, I would say, “Ok, Lord. One day.” Back then it was still too fresh to talk about, let alone write it down for other people.
Now the pressure to give back to God what he has given my family is too great. He brought us through the worst storm in our 21 years together. A lot of it was brought on by some really dumb decisions Lon and I had made. We took for granted the blessing He had given us. We tossed them aside to do as we pleased, not realizing how good we had it. I think God had to break us down, get our attention so that he could get us back to where we needed to be.
The lesson we learned through this storm was that we weren’t faithful over what God had given us. In order to get more, we had to be faithful and respectful of what we had. He blessed us with a beautiful home, which we had built. We had two new cars, two beautiful children and two solid jobs with excellent benefits and income. The only problem was neither of us was happy with our career paths. I wanted to work in my field of study, and Lon was anxious for advancement. But the day we decided to stepped out on the path to "happiness" is the day our lives started to crumble.
I’ll never forget being on the phone with a mortgage rep. who was telling me that we were going to foreclose on our home. I refused to believe it. In my mind, if there was a will, then there was a way to prevent it. I soon realized it was a battle I was going to lose.
I’ll never forget being on the phone with a mortgage rep. who was telling me that we were going to foreclose on our home. I refused to believe it. In my mind, if there was a will, then there was a way to prevent it. I soon realized it was a battle I was going to lose.
In March 2005, I started working at a local news station where I took a huge pay cut to work towards becoming a producer. I took the job with the mindset that I would be a producer in a year. We wouldn’t have to deal with the low income for long. Lon and I had talked about me leaving the University to pursue a career in journalism. A few months passed before I got a response from one of the stations in town where I had sent my resume. I had quit my job, but to keep money coming in, I became a substitute teacher. That worked out well.
A few months later, Lon decided to quit his job to pursue a part-time venture as a full-time occupation. Not much conversation about it, except that I thought it was a bad move. He was barely getting paid working it part time, so I could already see the road ahead. This goes back to us playing games with God’s blessings. Lon was wrong for not consulting me, but I was just as wrong for not including God in my decision to quit my job. We messed up, but there was a lesson in this for us; and there’s a lesson in this for anyone out there who may have found themselves unemployed and struggling.
Needless to say things went from bad to worse. Every bill we had fell behind, and I spent most of my time on the phone with bill collectors and the mortgage company trying to work deals. The money just wasn’t coming in steady anymore. My little income from the station was the only steady income we had. Paying bills made for a good game of lucky draw. Whichever bill was about to be turned off or repossessed is what got paid. It was a horrible existence.
Where Lon’s job wasn't dependable, mine was an awful place full of people who would cuss you out one minute and smile in your face the next - at least in the first year or so. It was very deadline driven, and because of the fast-pace, there was absolutely no time for training. I had to feel my way through the first year and a half. I found out the hard way the difference between print journalism and broadcast journalism.
In case you haven’t noticed from every one of my posts, I’m a long-winded writer. I like details. It’s perfectly fine in print. You’re taught to be descriptive and go into detail. Broadcast news is the opposite. Every piece of news that came into the newsroom had to be retold in 30 seconds or less – about 4-5 lines. That was the hardest thing in the world for me, and I caught a lot of flack for it. But that’s a story for another day.
The point I want to make here is that it added to the stress of everything that was happening at home. My hair started to fall out, and I broke out in a rash in my last year at the station that really didn’t go away until a few months after I finally quit. I was just thankful that at this point the kids were too young to understand what was happening.
The battle to save our house continued until September 2005 when Lon got a call that literally stopped us in our tracks. We were on our way to a meeting to see if we could get some help with our mortgage. The voice on the other end of the phone said that there was no need to come back to work because, in so many words, they couldn’t pay him anymore. To top it off, when we got to the meeting location and filled out the paperwork to see if we qualified for help; we were rejected because we made too much money. The nice lady gave us a card of some other services we could check out and sent us on our way.
That day we decided that we were not going to foreclose on our house. Our credit was already shot, but we didn’t want to add an unpaid mortgage to the list. We called a real estate agent and immediately put the house on the market.
We sold the house around the first of December 2005, a few weeks before it would foreclose. Up until the week before we signed the papers, we had no idea where we were going to live. Lon had found a job, but it wouldn’t start until the second week of January. We looked at several apartments, but most of them were out of our budget. Staying with family was not an option.
At this point, Lon was still too proud, and he refused to even ask for that kind of help. Our only option, it seemed, was to find a nice piece of cardboard behind the nearby shopping center. But God had a better plan in mind. It’s the only way I can explain our audacity to look for a house to rent in a newly developed, upscale community about a mile from our house.
Before all of this happened, we would drive through all the new subdivisions vowing that one day we would live there. The entrance into the community was very inviting with tall brick columns and a lighted waterfall. The grass was perfectly manicured and landscaped with a colorful array of flowers.
The sidewalks and medians were lined with huge magnolias, pine trees and crepe myrtles. There was no way we should have even gone in that direction a week from being on the streets. But then we drove past a new townhome development that had two models and one row of homes. One of them had a “For Rent” sign in the yard. Remember, this was about a year and a half before the bubble burst in the real estate market. Investors were buying up new homes and renting them just as fast.
We took a chance and call the agent to look inside the home. It was beautiful from the moment we walked through the door. I was sold when I walked into the kitchen that was almost an exact replica of the kitchen in our house down to the all black appliances with the glass top range and the black granite-like countertops.
Up the stairs in the hallway was a little nook. It was just like the one in our house where we had our computer set up. All it needed was the built-in desk and drawers. It had 3 bedrooms and two and a half baths. This townhouse was starting to look like our house on a smaller scale, and I knew it was where we were supposed to be. I got this overwhelming feeling that God was all over this.
We were going through this storm, but God was orchestrating it the whole time. It was great comfort to me, but our next challenge was actually getting the realtor to rent the townhouse to us. He had given us the keys to tour the townhouse on our own. On the way back to the office, Lon and I talked about how we would sell him on renting to us. We had a good amount of equity in the house, but we wouldn't have it in hand until the house was sold in another week. We knew we had to act fast to get this place.
Back in the rental office, we asked for an application and I proceeded to fill it out right then and there. In the meantime, Lon talked to the agent. We didn’t want to mess up any blessings that God had for us, so Lon was very honest about our situation. Besides, the opened Bible in the front entrance tipped us off that someone in the place was a Christian. We hoped it would win us a few points towards getting the place.
There we were sitting in this guy’s office. Lon hadn’t worked in three months, my income sucked and we were about to be on the streets. I’ll never forget the realtor saying that we were exactly the kind of renters the owner was looking for. That was exciting news!
After hearing our story, he told us about his experience. The owner of the company had given him a chance when he and his family fail on hard times. He said he wanted to help us out, and he could tell we were good people who were just going through a difficult time. He took us at our word that we would be back in a week with the deposit and the first month’s rent. We walked out of the office trusting in God that the agent wouldn’t give the townhouse to anyone else. We didn’t pay an application fee or leave a post-dated check. We just ended on a handshake that we would have a home in 7 days.
We were so relieved! Things were starting to fall in line, or so we thought. Lon would start working in a couple of weeks. We had found this beautiful townhouse in a gated community with access to the swimming pools, tennis courts and fitness centers at $200 to $300 less than the two bedroom apartments we had looked at. We could go back home and finish packing and cleaning, and for me, crying in every room.
We moved into the townhouse a week later in January 2006. The equity from the sell of the house was a good amount, but we owed so many people – family members and bill collectors. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to pay a bill. It was a huge relief, but I still didn’t feel a sense that we were out of the woods just yet. I know now that the lesson the Lord wanted us to learn was still another two years away.
Lon’s new job wasn’t as promising as we had hoped, but we were in no position to turn down work. The pay was low – still a fraction of what he made before. It was a position more fit for a college student, but Lon wasn’t about to quit. I could tell he was hurting inside, but he would never let me see it. He put on a good front for family and friends and whenever I would try to talk to him about it, he would tell me not to worry and that he was going to get us out of this mess one way or another.
Even with his job, we still continued to struggle. After the experience with the house, we were going to pay the rent no matter what. But other bills fell behind again. We eventually had to let Lon’s SUV go back, which left us with one car for a while. We barely had food to eat. I became very creative with meals to keep my family fed. We accepted every invitation to eat dinner with family on the weekends. It was also good to have a change of scenery and to leave our troubles behind for a few hours.
We also never stopped going to church. I remember working overnight on the weekends. I would leave the station after working on the Sunday morning show at 8 a.m., then rush home to get ready for church. Lon and the kids would be dressed and waiting for me. Most times, we couldn’t really afford the gas for the 35-minute drive, but we also believed we couldn’t afford not to go. We needed the fellowship, but most importantly we needed to hear the Word. It gave us strength to get through the week, and it helped to build our faith in God to keep away doubt and fear. When doubt did creep in, we would encourage each other.
We finally started to recognize our situation for what it was. It was a storm – the worse trial of our marriage and our lives. Our pastor would always say, “You may not be going through a storm now, but one day you might need this message.” We knew this was our time to put those messages and our faith and trust in God to the test. We wanted to prove to God that we trusted Him to make a way out of no way. Lon would always say, “God wouldn’t put more on us than we could bare.”
I think people really thought that because we were both working, we should have been doing OK, but what they didn’t take into account was the bills we had with a 75k per year income followed us when we were down to 40K – combined. It kind of made it harder to get through a really difficult time knowing people thought that way about us. We stopped asking for help after that.
Lon never gave up. Between 2006 and 2008, he had 4 jobs. The last one, his current job, finally put us back on the road to getting on track. By 2008, he put the pressure on me to quit the news business because it was taking a toll on my health, and the kids were getting older and starting to realized things weren’t right. Both of their grades started to fail, and it put a huge strain on our marriage. It’s funny how going through our own personal hell didn’t pull us apart, but everyday I decided to go into work that last year did.
Our struggle was a classic case of the message on those billboard signs "Tell God your plans and watch Him laugh." We brought a lot of this on ourselves by not praying for guidance or by not being prepared to make these moves financially. God let us go on and do as we pleased, but the whole time he had a hedge of protection around us. I truly believe He made sure we didn't foreclose on our house and that He led us to our townhouse and made sure had food on the table every day. But I believe he also allowed other things to happen in our lives that were really hurtful to ensure that we had no place else to look, but up to Him. He broke us down to our core and is still molding us into the people he would have us to be. Through all of this, Lonnie has learned to stand on his own and to trust in God and in his own ability.
For me, it’s been a lesson in how to trust God more and to really listen for his answers to my prayers. After I left the station, I stayed home for 4 months. I prayed about it this time, and I know it was the right decision. We didn’t miss the income or have nearly the kind of trouble we had before. Lon had been on his current job for a little over a year, and he worked part time to bring in extra money. I know God had our backs this time because Lon was making more on the part time job than on his 8 to 5, which made up for my loss of income.
Right after I started working at my current job in 2009, Lon's part-time job started to cut hours and pay. At this point our nation was knee-deep in an economic crisis. When most people were just starting to lose their jobs and homes, the Lord was bringing us out of our crisis. Lon and I ended up right back in the same types of jobs that we had quit, which is truly a blessing.
Lon is now being considered for a promotion after only three years on the job. There is some uncertainty with my job right now due to the economy. Just as with every government entity, budget cuts and possible lay-offs are looming. We’ve gotten through one hurdle – electing a new mayor (the first African American mayor). Now, it’s a game of wait and see. All I can say is no matter what happens; I know God has my back. I can trust that now whole-heartedly.
Wow!....thanks for sharing and reminding me that God knows the plans He has for me...plans to prosper me and give me new hope!
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