a lesson on faith

Our little family has been having a pretty tough year.  Sometimes, it has felt like nothing is going right, and as soon as we resolve one major problem, another hits us.  But through all of our trials in the past few months, we have been given so many blessings. I have been feeling so incredibly blessed lately, and I wanted to share a few of my experiences.

Back in December, I was having a really hard time dealing with stress. I'm a very high-stress person, and I've always had trouble dealing with anxiety. But it was really hitting me hard in December.  My biggest worry at the time was our housing situation.  We had been living in our townhouse almost a year, and our lease was going to be up at the end of January.  We were not renewing our contract mostly because we couldn't afford it, but also because we hated our landlord and he didn't ever take care of anything.  (Example:  Our living room ceiling leaked the entire year that we lived there, even though we told him about it and he promised to fix it on many different occasions.  And when I say it leaked, I mean it was bad enough that we had to put several big plastic tubs under all the leaks whenever it rained or snowed.)  So I had been on the lookout for cheaper housing for a few months.  I found a place in September and got us on their waiting list, but the average wait was 6 to 7 months, which wouldn't put us in a new place until mid-March or April.  Month-to-month leases & leases shorter than 6 months are pretty much non-existent around here, so we didn't know where we were going to live until the new place was available.  The only option we had found was splitting up our family--Jacob was going to have to find a room to rent in Columbia, and I was going to have to take the girls and move in with Jacob's parents, who live about an hour and a half away.  I hated the idea--every time we talked about it, I would burst into tears.  Even though I have amazing in-laws, I didn't want to be away from Jacob.  I didn't want to take my newborn baby and almost-2-year-old and live without my husband, only seeing him for 2 days on the weekend.  But we couldn't find any other solution, so we worked on finding Jacob a place to stay, and I tried not to think about it.

I remember having an especially hard time with my anxiety one night, so I sat down to re-read some of the talks from our church's October General Conference.  The talk I decided to read was Forget Me Not from Dieter F. Uchtdorf.  (The title is a link to his talk for anyone who wants to read it.)  One of the passages from his talk that really got to me was part of his fifth point, "Forget not that the Lord loves you" when he said, "Wherever you are, whatever your circumstances may be, you are not forgotten. No matter how dark your days may seem, no matter how insignificant you may feel, no matter how overshadowed you think you may be, your Heavenly Father has not forgotten you. In fact, He loves you with an infinite love."  After finishing the talk, I remember feeling so loved and so much at peace, and the incredible anxiety I had been feeling for weeks was gone.  A couple days later, I got a phone call.  The housing people had called to say that our name came up on the waiting list, and we would be able to move into our new place sometime in January... which was months before we should have been able to, with their normal wait.  I'd say that we were lucky, but I know that it wasn't simply luck.  There could not have been a more perfect answer to our problem.

I had another faith-strengthening experience this past month.  We have been having some extra stress lately due to finances.  I think finances & money stress most people out, and they've always been a problem for us, but this month we hit a new low.  We couldn't pay our bills.  We had enough money to pay maybe one-fifth of our bills for the month, and that was it.  We were having to choose which bills we were going to pay and which bills were going to go unpaid for a few months until Jacob's new student loans came in.  It was scary... we've never been in that situation before, and I didn't like it.

I have been working at the Sylvan Learning Center as a tutor in the evenings since we first moved to Columbia, but due to Jacob's clinical schedule, I basically had to quit.  It just doesn't work anymore with his schedule, and one of us has to be here with our girls.  I joined a website a little over a year ago where people post childcare/babysitting jobs to see if I could find something that would work with our situation, but there has never been anything that would work for us.  With only one car, and Jacob's class/clinical schedule being what it is, and with his clinical sites not all being in Columbia, and having two kids of my own, I just couldn't find any job that would work with everything else in our crazy lives.

I talked to my mom quite a bit about our situation, because she's my mom, and I love her, and she's one of my best friends, and I talk to her about almost everything.  My mom always gives me the same advice when I call her about my problems:  pray, ask the Lord for help, have faith, don't lose hope.  And I try, but I don't always have enough faith.  Sometimes, I lose hope.  When I look at our situation and I can't see any possible way that it can be resolved, I feel hopeless and I freak out.  And I cry.  But my mom was right about our housing problem back in December--despite the fact that there was no possible solution (that I could see), everything worked out!  And again, with our financial situation this month, my mom was right.

I already mentioned the website I joined to look for childcare jobs... well, after being on the website over a year and actively searching for jobs but never finding anything, a job fell into my lap.  The woman didn't even post a job--she and her husband just saw my profile, and they contacted me about watching their daughter a few days a week.  I started last week, and the job really is perfect.  They bring her here, and I watch her while still being able to watch my own children.  I will earn more watching her than I ever did in a month working at Sylvan, and I never even have to leave my house.

And the opportunities didn't stop there.  Around the same time, I found out about a second website for childcare jobs, so I joined that one and applied to a few jobs.  I start an evening babysitting job next week, working on weeknights.  The schedule is perfect--Jacob will always be home & able to watch our kids so that I can leave, and the one night that I can never work due to Jacob's church responsibilities is the one night that the mother doesn't need someone.  

I also have a 3-day babysitting job at the end of the month, which I am able to do because it's during Jacob's break between his summer clinicals & his fall semester.  In the three days I work, I'll earn enough money to pay a fourth of our bills for August.

After a year of finding nothing, I got three jobs in one week.  Luck?  I think not!

My faith has been strengthened so much by these experiences.  Every time we have had a serious problem and it seems like there is no possible solution, Heavenly Father has given us one. Elder Uchtdorf definitely had it right... Heavenly Father has not forgotten us.