Hanging on

Last year, our Stake President told a story about when he and his wife were newly married and had so little money. They were scraping all the time to even have enough for the basics. But they were getting by. One day he was praying to see God's hand more in his life. He knew they were being blessed, but things felt so hard! He said he was driving home and he suddenly noticed all the houses around his. They all had new roofs. But his house had the same old roof it had always had. He felt the Spirit tell him: "Look! You haven't had to replace your roof! That's God's hand in your life."

I loved that story because it's so unexpected. The ugly old roof turns out to be an indication of God's love because the ugly old roof still works! A few months after I heard the story I still couldn't stop thinking about it. It was nagging at me…like it meant something for me too. Times are hard right now, aren't they? We do have so much, and yet—as my friend said to me recently—don't you just about have a panic attack every time you look at your receipt from the grocery store? I do! The cost of living feels unsustainable, and the future sometimes seems so nebulous and scary! When life feels like this, every unexpected expense seems like such a blow—like, "Oh no, not another thing, not now!" And for a few years now I've felt that "not now!" feeling over and over again with our children apparently on a quest to break everything we own, car insurance going up exponentially with teenage boy drivers having accidents, huge property tax increases, gas and grocery prices going crazy…

Anyway, after yet another of these "not now, not again!" moments, I was feeling a little betrayed by God—not because I expect Him to make everything smooth and perfect for us! But only because I'd just been praying for help in that specific area and it felt like, "Wait, this is my answer? But this is actually…the opposite of what I was asking for." Ha! I had this running list of things I was already worried about: "This is barely hanging on! Soon we're going to have to fix it and we just can't fix another thing!" But then because of the Stake President's story that had been on my mind, I started thinking harder about all those things in our house that were still hanging on. I started making a list of them.

• I backed into the garage door with our van (I know!) but when the guy came to fix it, he was able to just replace one panel instead of replace the whole thing like we'd feared. 
• The microwave was sparking and even flaming sometimes (I know! Dangerous! Should have gotten an immediate replacement!). It made the most awful noise. Actually, we grew kind of fond of it because Gus would say "the micwowave is gwumbwing." But—somehow—it held out and kept working for almost a year before finally giving out for good. 
• The vacuum was having trouble we couldn't seem to fix even after looking up all kinds of tutorials. For a while it seemed to be getting worse every time we used it. But then suddenly it kind of fixed itself. We didn't really know how. And it's still not perfect…but it's adequate and it works!
• The toaster plug broke, but it was only the grounding plug, so we were able to rig it back together with glue and it's still working.
• The car Seb uses has had various problems. It's gone through series of plastic panels on the bottom of it, which start hanging down, and then scraping the road, and then breaking off. Various warning lights go on. And we've had to fix a few things. But they've always been smaller than expected and some of them have mysteriously improved without us doing anything!
• The dishwasher was showing signs of problems for quite a while. We were sure we'd have to give in and call a repairman. But one day I realized it had been a couple months and I hadn't seen any sign of the problematic behavior. I guess the problems just…resolved?
• The iPad I use for some of our homeschool stuff gave out without warning. I was resigned to doing without, but then I was able to get an old one to use from some that Sam had left over from his BYU students.
• The kitchen sink faucet kept coming loose, but Sam was able to fix it…sort of. (I think it's coming loose again, but it worked for quite some time!)
• The plate under the swivel chair in our library broke, and when we tried to email the company about it, they said they couldn't do a repair NOR did they have any replacement parts. We thought we were just out of luck. But then Sam found a random part for $23 on Amazon that wasn't meant for the same brand or anything, but looked like it might work, and he ordered and installed it and it DID work!
• A while ago, my blog just…disappeared for a few days. I got an email about it being classified as "spam" or something, which made no sense, but I couldn't get any customer service to help and I was just SICK about it. I thought I was going to lose all these writings, all these pictures, forever. But then somehow, after a few days of extreme worry—it was back! You better believe I backed it up and have been trying to slowly print out books of it, knowing that could happen again at any time! But I was so grateful my previous failure to prepare didn't lead to me losing it forever!
• The children all needed SO MANY SHOES last year. We eked out what hand-me-downs we could, and some of them wore sizes that weren't quite right, and some of them stayed in their old ones longer than was quite ideal. But somehow we made it through a whole season and when we got to the new season there were the right sorts of hand-me-downs again, and I didn't have to buy all of them at once like I feared I would have to!
• My computer's charging ports have been bad for years, but there was still one that worked. Then it started not being able to charge at all. It finally just died altogether and I had to take it in to the Apple store, and the guys called it a "vintage model" and seemed hopeless about fixing it. But one of them managed to at least get it to turn on again using a certain kind of keyboard reset. No one knew what the problem was. No one could fix the problem. But I took note of what he did and the next time it wouldn't charge, I tried it, and it worked again! And for now, it's still working!

I could actually make this list twice as long (cracked-but-not-unusable windshields! Threadbare-but-not-unmendable pants! Unsightly-but-not-unfixable holes in walls!) but by the time I got here, I was crying, because I just knew that the things that didn't break when they should have—the miracles we didn't see—would have made an even longer list than this list of "things still hanging on." And I knew I was getting a glimpse of God's hand behind the scenes in our lives.

I felt a bit hesitant to post this, because I know our little troubles are so comparatively small. I know that "trials" like "microwave repair" would seem like unimaginable riches in so many homes! And I know that sometimes the worst-case scenario DOES happen at the worst possible time; the car DOES get totaled; the pipes DO burst. We've been in that place often enough, and God can be found there too. And some of these things for us, listed and unlisted, really are still teetering on the edge of disaster, and may yet give out or cost us all sorts of money to repair! But—whether they do or don't—I just felt a strong need to pause and be thankful; to acknowledge and remind myself that "barely hanging on"…is still "hanging on"! And "hanging on" is sometimes all the blessing you need!

I suppose we will never know the troubles Heavenly Father completely saves us from. The car accident we didn't get in. The job we didn't lose. The appliance that didn't break. I'm grateful, in the abstract, for those things. But there's something astounding about seeing God's hand in the broken, teetering, duct-taped-together parts of our life as well—to realize that even when times are hard, even in the specific details OF the hard things—He's there, keeping His eye on things, holding His finger in the dike while we catch our breath, sheltering us and strengthening us and propping us up. Helping us hang on.