I

We have two family businesses, and I know my husband doesn’t run them alone, but he alone comes home to me. It’s him that I see carry the weight of the world his shoulders. The weight that often brought him to his knees in desperate cries to God. It’s him that I’ve seen spend the last 6 years grasping at any straw he could, to hold it all together, to keep from losing it all, though we’ve come close many times.

Branch offices closed. Over a hundred employees dwindled down to a handful. It was business, right? Not personal? To my husband it was personal. To him, they were people with families to take care of, and because of all this, they would be jobless.

Cash is king, right? Or at least I’ve heard it said. Well the king began to die a slow death. We borrowed. We sold. We redeemed life insurance. We wiped out our retirement. And today, we are still paying for it. Dealing with the repercussions of the economic crash, still picking up the pieces and mending broken parts of our livelihood. There have been testings by fire, trial after trial, and more tribulations. There is so much more of the story I could tell.

Two things held him together as he was holding it all together — his devotion to God and to us. He has a dream for Kingdom business. And its purpose? To save lives, by the product he sells and by the support he’s able to give. And he works tirelessly to give us, his wife and children, the best he possibly can.

What was it like to see all that you’ve built up, fall apart? To see combined millions of dollars slip through your fingers like water, helpless to hold on to it, and have to count it as loss?

How much time do you have?

The economic crash affected us all, in more painful ways than we could tell. Perhaps our stories would fill volumes. We each suffered our own losses. The nation suffered. However, we cannot ever deny the faithfulness of our God through it all.

 

II

After years of planning my dream home, there I was sitting at a table in Chuck-E-Cheese. We were at a nephew’s birthday party. I had a napkin on the table, and a pencil in hand. It took only minutes. After years of dreaming and drawing the “big house”, it took only 5 minutes to draw the “small house”.

Our dream house plan had an extra room just in case we decided to have a fourth baby.
Six bathrooms became two.
Six bedrooms plus an office, mudroom, tech room, and garage apartment became two bedrooms with the possibility of a third.

A three car garage, became one. And the 3,500 square foot home we came from, the one we were trying to sell at the time, was packed up and squeezed into just over 2,000 square feet of the “small house”.

And God has showed us over the last six years of living here, bigger doesn’t mean better, though the temptation to believe so, remains.

Husband and I will mention every so often, “Thank God we didn’t build the big house.”

It’s clear now. Hindsight is 20/20. It would have been disastrous. The man of God, he was right. And God was faithful to preserve us.

Over the next 20 plus days, I will invite you into the “small house” — our home, unveiled to you, and what has gone into the undoing and the making of this women as she’s endeavored to be a maker of her home.

You might also like:

When what you build is not your dream home. Part 1

When what you build is not your dream home. Part 2

See all posts in the series: Making of a Home [Unveiled]