The American Dream, or the American Idol?

I have to say up front:  It is hard and stressful and, sometimes, downright impossible being destitute.

Destitute in an American sense, that is--where we can live well below the poverty line but still have a home and a car and everything that we truly need to survive. 

It's painful to write about our struggles; it's embarrassing to admit that we're struggling to even survive...But as miserable as it can be and as desperately as I hope this time to be over, God is teaching my heart some beautiful things through it, and I feel like I should share it...

Often, when we face difficult circumstances, we buckle down and try to hold on, to just "white-knuckle" it until we get through.  But that response is a form of self-dependence, and causes us to miss out on God-dependence.  Hard times--I'm starting to get it through my thick skull!--are like a personal invitation from God for us to come, sit, be still, and see His greatness.  To sit and watch in awe and wonder the power He wants to work in our lives.  If you've ever watched the Northern Lights dance across the night sky--so stunning, so amazing--I imagine it like that.  It's scary to let go--I know!  I'm your classic holder-on-er do-it-myself-er!

But even if we let go, He never lets go of us!

And it frees us to stand in awe of Him, to let Him work something more beautiful than we could have, and to well up our hearts with an overwhelming fountain of praise.

Our battle is not just against our own selves, however.  The enemy knows he is not as powerful as God, and so he tries to feed us lies about God. 
Is God really good?
Does God love us?
What have we done to deserve this?
God doesn't care about us...
The list is endless!

After 2 years of full-time job-hunting, in any field, across the globe, even being denied positions at fast food and factory and gas station companies, while many faithful Christians are praying for us...and the insecurity requiring frequent uprooting...we have fallen into discouragement about God's provision for us.  I wish we were stronger.  I guess we just got tired, and then confused, and then the lies started to sound too good to our sore hearts, and it got easier to entertain them.

For me, personally, one of the main lies I have entertained is that I have done something wrong or not been good enough, and this unending hardship is God's punishment for my spiritual failures, and it will continue until I can figure it out and get myself together.  It's so easy to believe sometimes!

But as our pastor stated today, "God is not a mafia boss!"  He doesn't come around checking to see if you've paid what you owed or behaved in the right manner, and beat you if you haven't!  He doesn't work like that.  The good news is, we KNOW that we've failed!  We fail every day of our lives, and there's no way we'll ever live up to God's standard.

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23

Yeah, that doesn't sound like good news at all.  But it is, because it means that our hope is not in our own goodness.  Our hope is in God's greatness!  The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God--all of life, all of everything, begins and ends with God.  It's not about us at all.

We often think--and it's so easy to--that we build up a moral rapport with God, and He is then obliged to bless us.  The reverse of that is that He will punish us if we are less than perfect.  In reality, we are morally bankrupt, and only Jesus offers us a perfect record, if we will merely accept His grace!

So, back to that American dream...It's kind of what I've been chasing and worshiping in my heart.  It's what I dream of to keep myself going each day, and I think, "When my husband has a job, and we have a home, and we can afford to pay our bills and provide good things for our children--THEN, everything will be okay."  I have idolized money, comfort, worldly security.  I am looking to things to save us.

Another thing our pastor said today that really struck a chord with me is this: "People get discouraged because they're chasing their idols, and come to church to learn how to pray in order to get their idol...They leave rejuvenated, but through the week get discouraged again because it didn't work, after all, and come back the next week to get another 'dose'...But make Christ your treasure, and the stuff won't matter!" 

It's not about the stuff.  You can have the stuff or not have the stuff.  God loves us and wants to give us good things, but it's our hearts that matter, and making sure our priorities are right. 

Life Status Update

Okay, so we've been both crazy busy AND sans internet lately, trying to get back to some sort of normal...We're winding down our time here in this apartment and looking at a move within the next 5 weeks, and we still don't know where.  I'm trying to keep my cool, but I'll admit it's a little stressful.  Owen is working hard--both on dissertation and on finding a job, any job, to get us through this next year.  We're looking nationwide, and it's really astounding how impossible it is to find a job when you're willing to do almost anything for almost any pay and go pretty much anywhere.  It's almost like someone is out there physically shutting doors in our faces.

We continue to see God work on behalf of others around us, working miracles and meeting their needs, and we just sit and wait and wonder when it will be our turn. (And might I venture to say, though I know this sounds biased and unsympathetic, that our needs seem dramatically more desperate than these needs of others that are being met.)  Yesterday, I was stopped in a traffic jam where a police officer was directing traffic, and he waved each of the three other lanes of traffic through, then when it should've been our turn, he skipped us and went through the whole cycle again.  That's kind of how I'm feeling in life right now--everyone else is getting one, two, three "turns" while we sit and wait and get none.

I will admit that my faith is being challenged...but we're still holding on to the promise that God has prosperous plans for us and He is willing and able to take care of our needs. We're hoping and praying that all these closed doors and discouragements are leading us to something unbelievably grand...hoping...praying...

In other news, I am currently 9 weeks in the pregnancy, and doing well if you don't count the extreme nausea and exhaustion.  We met our new midwife and really love her, so we're excited about that.  We all are healthy and well, and generally happy!

Here's hoping to have some exciting news to share soon!

Powerful Provisions

There are so many incredible ways God has shown Himself faithful and powerful to us over the course of these last weeks and months, and has provided for our deepest needs, and I just want to brag on Him a little here!

As we know, God's power is made perfect in our weakness, so let's start with our weakness...

It's been no secret that our life situation right now is a fair bit challenging.  No one chooses to have no job, no means of sustaining life, no home, no ability to provide for your own family, and to have to uproot pretty much annually...And that seems like it's just the tip of the iceberg, but I'll resist being dramatic! Anyway, I held on to faith for as long as I could, but by the end of July, my faith was faltering so badly, I think it was hanging on by only a very thin thread. 

Lately, we've had several rather significant needs weigh on us all at once:

1. Housing--we need a new place to live, that fits in our budget and is flexible with our "we-have-no-idea-what-the-future-holds" situation right now...hard to find.
2. Vehicle--now it makes sense why we needed that minivan so suddenly, eh?  Without a bigger vehicle, we simply would've been house-bound. 
3. Prenatal care for the baby--good doctors abound, but our hearts were set on a midwife and a home birth; it's just that important to me, that if we couldn't have had one here, we would have moved.
4. Job--all of the above needs require money!  Without a job, we just wouldn't be able to support our 5 lives.  Numerous applications out returned no calls back, on anything!  Very disheartening, to say the least.  

So I just wanted to tell how God is beginning to meet our needs and encourage my faith.  We still are in need of items 1 and 4 (housing and job), but out of seeming impossibility, God has recently brought about 2 of our big needs: a larger vehicle/minivan, and a great midwife.  Considering our jobless situation, we thought there would be no possible way for us to meet the vehicle need, but God went powerfully before us and opened all the right doors, and the process went so smoothly and painlessly, with lots of encouragement along the way.  As for the midwife, they are hard to come by in northern Michigan, and the few that exist are a minimum of an hour and a half away from our location.  But God put a friend in our path who recommended a midwife who will actually travel to Petoskey, and we feel comfortable with her and couldn't be happier. 

I know it doesn't look well on me to share my Doubting Thomas story, but I'm encouraged by God's grace to strengthen our faith in the ways we need it.  Recently, I needed to see to believe, and He answered, and renewed my faith in His provision for our other upcoming needs.