Not everything in life has been so easy..

Sometimes, I get the feeling that people look at my husband and I  and believe that we have it made- that things have been so easy for us. It's easy to look at us and think that because we have no kids, we both have good jobs, a new home. But no one knows the struggle and the difficult journey that it took to get us to this place. We just took the bad and never let it beat us but rather we fought our way back up. There's a saying, "It's not how big of a Dog you have in the fight, it's how big of a fight is in the dog." And I am here to tell you, the husband and I both have a lot of fight in us- we don't back down when we are kicked down, we don't give up. We get back up and keep fighting and don't stop until we win. We have always had God on our side and without him, we wouldn't have succeeded in life.

We went through deaths, unemployment, people that have tried to spread rumors and ruin our lives, break up our marriage, accusations to assassinate our character, laugh and attack us when our dog was paralyzed and we were so broken already. We felt like we were left to die with no one around who cared- when you start feeling like Job in the Bible, that kind of tells you the place that we were in. 

Let me back up so that you can get a clear picture of our story..January 2011, my husband lost his Father which was extremely heart-wrenching for him. He and his Dad were so close- they worked together every day and even on the weekends, his Dad would stop by to see how we were doing on our house remodel. After his Dad passed, we weren't left with too many options- there was no such thing as a severance package or the office left for my husband to run as his own. Engineering was not at an all time high where we lived, so the only choice we really had was to sell our home and move on to find new jobs. But before we could do that, my husband had to finish out the last few work projects on his own and finish our house remodel- that in itself was a daunting task to take on. It took us several months to finally get it all together and meet with the first real estate agent to put it on the market.

We decided to move out of our home so that the real estate agent could show the house anytime without us being in the way. During that time, I prayed and made the decision to give up my comfy job at the hospital- that was really hard for me to do, because I had really great benefits and perks there and my boss adored me and begged me every day not to leave. But I had to do what God was leading me to do and that was to trust in him, take that leap of faith (with no jobs or place to live) and move back to my hometown of Thomasville. So that is exactly what we did.

We were unemployed for a while and it was interesting to watch the people that we had always helped in their darkest times, pass us by, never asking how we were doing. It was definitely an eye-opening experience, that is for sure. You find out who your true friends are and who is sincere and who is insincere.

We did finally get a job, but it was working on the road for 3 weeks out of the month, including weekends- it was 100 hour weeks and extremely exhausting. We took our dog with us for the cooler months but had to leave him at the kennel or with my sister for 3 weeks at a time in the summer months and that alone broke my heart. I came to resent the job, because they just kept loading more and more work on us because we were the nice ones. It got to the point, that we had no time at all left for ourselves, for family- we were just spent. The owner had promised us both office jobs, but in the end, she didn't give me the office job that I asked for and my husband's ended up back in Albany while we were living in Thomasville. The office ended up being chaotic and the driving back and forth everyday became too much, so my husband decided to leave and look for work elsewhere.

For both of us, finding another job was not as easy this time. Even with both of us having degrees and experience. After putting in almost 100 resumes to different jobs- it took almost 6 months for me to find a job. At this point, I was so depressed, we were running out of money, but I knew in my heart that God wasn't going to let us down- he had always been there in our lowest points in life. So this certain day, I dropped to my knees and just cried out to God -I  told him that I didn't know what to do any longer but that I was utterly broken and I was giving it over to him and giving up control. If I know one thing, whenever I've poured my heart out to God, he has always heard my cries and I trusted in him to make everything right. Then I went to sleep and I asked my husband to please not to bother waking me unless he had some good news for me..

You have to remember - we still hadn't sold our home after 1 year so we had to end up switching to a more aggressive real estate agent. Since we had no money from our house sale, we were using what money we had left in our bank account and home equity loan. With no money coming in for 6 months and still paying for our mortgage and land loan, you can imagine how little we had left to live on. I was so scared but still trusting in God- We had never had to worry about money in our life before, so this was a new thing for both of us..

So while I am napping, my husband comes into the room and I thought he said, someone called for you about a job and you can call them back when you wake up. But I realized he said that the man about the job was on the phone at that moment! So I jumped out of bed and tried to get myself together and I answered the phone as professional as I could (having just woke up with zero coffee) and the man from the Law Firm was on the phone and he said that if I wanted it, the job was mine. It took all I could do not to scream on the phone with him, but I was really excited, so I said, I would love it, thank you so much! He laughed and said I could come in on Monday- after I hung up the phone, I screamed and jumped into my husband's arms- I got the job!! God had answered my prayers! I was so ecstatic!

I want to leave this on a happy note for today, but I am going to continue it tomorrow- there's so much more ups and downs to this story..it's too long to put in one blog post. I hope that you come back to continue reading our story.