I was making the bed in the corner bedroom, listening to NPR’s coverage of the economic meltdown. It was October 2008, just before my son’s thirteenth birthday. After twenty-some years on InterVarsity staff in California, Pennsylvania, and Canada, my husband, Dan, and I had packed our family and moved to Connecticut. We were there at the behest of supporters who invited us—begged us—to help them start a firm with a completely new model for making and giving money. 

We knew mountains of money were being generated through activity in hedge funds and other investments, and we knew that lots of very rich people were getting richer. The new venture created a socially responsible investment fund to be owned entirely by a charitable foundation. It was so new that our partners patented the legal structure. Where fund managers normally took huge profits, in our fund, profits beyond salaries and expenses would be funneled into the foundation and given away to organizations working on mentoring, community development, and the arts. After raising our own salaries for two dozen years, the thought of working from the other side of the giving process was appealing. 

We resisted—actually, I was adamantly against it at first—but in late 2007 when it became clear that our time in Canada was at a natural end and that this might offer us a learning curve, we said yes. We had been working with university students our whole careers. I forewent grad school to teach undergraduates how to follow Jesus and how to lead others. I loved working with students and staff. I loved seeing God at work in the college environment. But, we thought, it’s Jesus we follow and not any one ministry. Maybe this will be just the thing to press us into new growth. 

We readied our Toronto house to sell and began to look for a place near the firm’s offices in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. I remember realizing with my husband that we would need to make three times what we had made in previous positions in order to afford a modest life there. But no problem: We would be working in the finance industry and with people for whom our numbers were nothing new and really nothing big. We sold a house and bought one. We said goodbye to our people and to our former careers. And we moved. 

 

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01.  Waiting Out the Storm

Maybe we should’ve taken moving day as a sign. It rained so hard that the beachfront section of town was inundated and intersections were impassable. When I went to pick up lunch for the movers, the water on the street rose above the door of our van between the moment I went into the pizzeria and the moment I returned. It was torrential and damaging, a “hundred-year flood”—so rare, you can pretty much count on it not happening. Except, of course, when it does. Our new house sat on the hill above the flood line. But our new town was in rough shape for months after the rains. 

We started working together with the investment team in a Stamford office. What we had dreamed up and developed from Toronto was now real and part of the Money Belt of New York and its surroundings. It was unfathomably fun to give away resources to people who really needed them, to know we were speaking the kingdom back to a system of money and power that consistently indulged its own avarice and exercised a profound lack of care for the poor. Here was a chance to do something. 

The doing lasted for about two months. By the morning I was making the bed and listening to NPR, financial markets and systems were on an avalanche descent into ruin, chaos, and fearsome loss. By November, we all dropped to minimum wage in an effort to conserve remaining cash and get investors lined up. By December 11, 2008, when Bernie Madoff was arrested—right down the road—people stopped investing. Investors were basically shoving their cash under mattresses and waiting out the storm. Even Christians who believed in our cause were unwilling to take any risks on a new firm, no matter how attractive they found us. 

I fluffed the comforter over the bed as I listened to NPR’s Planet Money guys describe what was happening with the banks, how various fall-downs and adjustments were going to affect the rest of the economy. I felt a pang at the top of my stomach, a flutter, and then my blood paused in place. A lump in my throat. Tears. Tight chest. What if? And how? And what are we going to do if . . . ? 

Most intuitive people experience a certain amount of friction around this gift (or tendency): You’re quick to imagine the dark scenario, and sometimes—maybe even often—you’re accurate about it. The tension is that your ability to imagine it doesn’t make it true, and no matter how accurate you were last time, you might be wrong in this round. But even when you know you might be off, it’s difficult to dismiss the dark picture. It can feel downright disingenuous to push it off. Sometimes you know what’s coming. I hoped with all myself that I was wrong this time. God is bigger than our dark scenarios—right? 

Sometimes that dark scenario is wrong. But sometimes it’s right. 

I saw the dark scenario accurately, and I felt afraid. I saw our jobs disintegrating, our kids’ lives disrupted after just having moved from another country. I saw a financial wreck: We were about to become poor. I suspected, despite talk of putting the firm back together after things improved, that it was permanently finished. I thought it unlikely that our partners would do very much to care for us, even though their resources significantly exceeded ours. I imagined we would have to stay in this place where we knew no one, had no friends to lean on—but that we wouldn’t stay very long before we’d have to pull up and move again. 

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02.  Heart Pounding Fear

It turned out I had good reason to be afraid. Sure, I believed God is good—all the time!—and I believed that he doesn’t pick us up and move us simply to drop us on our butts somewhere for his amusement. I knew that Jesus is with us, the Holy Spirit is active, and that the Lord delights in rescuing and blessing his people. But still . . . I saw what was coming, and I was afraid. I did not say that out loud, even in my own head. But whether I admitted it or not, I felt physical, heart-pounding fear.  

From day to day over the ensuing year, I fought with myself over that fear. What I knew in my head about God’s purposes and commitments and his help and hope conflicted sharply with what I saw and felt in my body. My gut had often led me to trust God and take risks as a missionary and pastor. Now it instructed me to find a way to provide for myself and my family, to protect, to get out of the hundred-year flood at any cost.  

And with fear came anger, frustration, disgust. We were on our way to file for unemployment insurance when my husband mentioned to me that our partners on the investment side of the project were on their way to Mexico for a vacation. That day. Wait. What? The news added indignation to the apprehension swirling through me. “They’re using their American Express points,” my husband explained. “They figured it might be awhile before they can take another vacation.” I was flabbergasted at the brazenness of these people who were supposed to be our “partners,” who had begged us to join their wealthy world and then dropped us to run off on vacation. We didn’t possess things like American Express points. 

I would’ve thought the partners would share their resources with us. After all, we were poor, relative to them; we never had their level of income. We didn’t own the seven-million-dollar houses they owned or drive the Mercedes and Audi vehicles they drove. I thought, surely God will prompt them to help us. This was the first of several rounds. I kept seeing perfect solutions to our situation—someone who might share with us, opportunities to move as far away as possible, an ideal job—I saw fixes, but nothing got fixed, nobody came to our aid, and God seemed not to be sharing his thoughts. 

We arrived at the unemployment office. If you weren’t depressed before you got there, the unkempt gray building and its unkempt gray people would’ve been enough to drop your mood. When it was our turn to talk to The Unemployment Guy, we discovered that because we had lived and worked in Canada for the bulk of the preceding four quarters, we would be eligible for an insurance benefit based only on minimum wage. That was about $100 a week for me. 

I stared at The Guy. “How are we supposed to cover our house payments and feed our kids?” He shrugged. “I dunno, ma’am.” 

Well, I didn’t know, either. And because we were both overwhelmed, Dan and I were of little help to each another. Our friends were shocked that such a thing would happen to the two of us, who had always been the Good Kids. We’re both oldest children. We were students of the year in our high schools. We were youth group leaders. We graduated with honors, worked hard and did The Right Things. Suddenly none of that mattered. Being the People Who Play Well by the Rules, it turned out, afforded us absolutely no advantage. 

We set about trying to reboot our life. But the next few months were insulting. I had never applied for a position and not gotten an interview, but now I applied for dozens and dozens of jobs and got nothing in response. I applied for jobs in grocery stores and banks. I applied for every writing job I saw, including one for a wrestling entertainment company. I applied for everything I could conceivably do. Nothing! Dan, too, my brilliant and accomplished husband. Nothing! Of course, it didn’t help that we were new there. We had no connections and no network. And a lot of other better-connected people were also out of work and looking for the same jobs. 

I heard politicians complaining that people were kicking back on unemployment “entitlements” and that we should change unemployment benefits from this entitlement to a loan. I couldn’t imagine getting lazy on $100 a week. As I watched our small savings dwindle (Inter Varsity staff are essentially domes-tic missionaries who don’t make that much to start with, so we never had all that much to save), our credit card total rise, and our employment prospects falter, I wondered how anyone expected unemployed people to pay back unemployment insurance as a “loan” after months of no income. And I wondered what God expected us to do. 

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03.  Keeping Things Normal

We tried to keep things as normal as possible for our kids. Dan coached basketball. Our two boys played on Little League teams. Baseball games were a particular struggle. There were new bats we couldn’t afford. And other parents showed up in their black Mercedes SUVs (de rigueur in Fairfield) with coffee from the local shop. When we first moved, I had actually been happy to drive our ’93 Geo Prism and our old minivan—it seemed like a useful stand against consumerism and an opportunity for faith in the context. But now our old cars felt like jalopies, and not being able to afford a latte made me self-conscious and left out. 

Friends came to visit. I mostly wished they wouldn’t. I rarely got through a conversation without dissolving. We couldn’t go out with them. I was sad most of the time. What was there to talk about? I felt pressure to say the stuff I know you’re supposed to say about how God will come through and it’s just a matter of time and all that, but those phrases were hollow to my heart. I couldn’t be the pastor and leader people expected me to be. 

I was afraid of looking poor. I was afraid of being poor, of progressively losing self-determination. I was afraid of being found stupid, even in my own eyes, for having thought this whole thing would work to begin with, for thinking that we could actually do something and develop better financial footing through jobs that paid us well. After a lifetime of working at high levels and long hours for little money, I thought we might finally be able to save for college, afford braces, make car repairs, have a nicer dinner out now and then. Now that dream appeared wrecked and without remedy. I was ashamed. 

I felt more limited than I could have imagined. What started out as a chance to do something for other people shifted to a season of the unknown, waiting to see whether God would do something for us. I was powerless and vulnerable, and all the tools and skills I had honed were irrelevant. I feared we would never be able to rebuild again. We had already moved four times for the sake of ministry calling. Each move was positive, but it required dismantling and then rebuilding every part of our lives—every time. Even when we were energized and purposeful in moves, they were tiring. 

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04.  Just below the Surface

Fear is exhausting. The constant internal conversation— fight or flight?—the anxiety about what’s next, the friction between what’s hoped for and what’s real… it’s overwhelming. I couldn’t get rid of panic. I tried long walks, Pilates with a DVD, watching movies. I spent a lot of time choosing paint colors so we could get the house in shape to sell. I couldn’t work up the energy to play the piano as I normally would. I cooked, listlessly, trying to make cheap meals creative. It was hard to eat dinner with our kids or to get into deep conversation with my husband. No matter what we talked about, the fear was just below the surface, the lightest touch pulled up the dread. 

About three months in, I sat down in a coffee shop where I had figured I could afford one weekly coffee-and-writing session. I was on something like the tenth rewrite of the opening performance piece for an enormous conference. I was stuck. I couldn’t wrangle my brain away from panic fully enough and long enough to create something about a God who, quite honestly, wasn’t all that attractive to me in the moment. I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. Did Jesus have something in mind, and was I missing it? 

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05.  Asking God

As I sat down with my latte—and I have to say, those were the best lattes because the baristas at that shop always made them beautiful and because I appreciated them so deeply—I asked God, “What am I supposed to do, here?” I needed to know how I was supposed to stop being freaked out. What could Jesus possibly expect from me and from this situation? There was no evidence that everything was going to work out. The phrase came to my head, Stay in the boat. It was a phrase I had spoken in a sermon at an arts conference a year or so back. Stay in the boat. 

It was a talk on the story of Jesus with his disciples out on the sea in the storm. For a moment it looked to the disciples like Jesus was out of it, asleep in the boat. Really, how thoughtless of him. Didn’t he care if they drowned? I considered what I knew about the story and remembered the images I had so often read, studied, and preached. Jesus appeared not to be aware. He seemed not to be actively present. He didn’t demonstrate care. As the wind howled around them and the boat took on water, the disciples—like normal people—got scared. They were afraid for their lives. “Teacher, don’t you care if we die?” 

Now we were talking. 

I hadn’t said it out loud to myself: I was so busy reminding myself that of course God cared and he definitely had a plan and everything happens for good for those of us to love God and are called according to his purpose and he doesn’t bring us somewhere just to drop us on our butts and you know there’s going to be a way where there seems to be no way and— 

What I really wanted to say was, “Come on, Jesus, we’re drowning here.” I needed God to intervene and save us. We needed something. We needed everything. 

Fear is a mechanism of protection. It makes us flee or fight. It prompts us either to stand our ground and bend situations to our blessing—or to create as much distance as we can between a threat and ourselves. In some ways, it’s a healthy response, designed to alert us to danger so we can respond appropriately. Fear is about dark scenarios, about anticipating bad things. Anticipatory dread climbed from my gut to my throat regularly, daily, sometimes hourly. I spent immense energy combating that dread and trying to redirect my attention to things other than how terrible life would be. I was really afraid of losing our capacity to choose. And I was afraid of being humiliated. I already felt humiliated. We were losers. And there were plenty of ways, it seemed, and plenty of opportunity to keep losing. 

I remembered the zillion Bible studies where I had helped students see that in Mark’s text, the opposite of faith in not, as we so often imagine, doubt, but rather fear. Jesus sets faith and fear at odds. Why did Jesus contrast fear with faith? I didn’t feel unfaithful, exactly. I mean, I was trying to live out the stuff of the gospel like always. But the gospel stuff like always wasn’t holding up that well in this climate. I knew how to live on low salary, with tight schedule, and limits of ministry. But this level of utter ambiguity about the future, the dead-end of job-hunting in the economy of 2008, being stuck in a very expensive place, just when we had no money at all, was more than I knew how to manage. 

By the time they took the trip across the sea, the disciples had been with Jesus for quite some time—and yet when he calmed the storm, they still asked, “Who is this?” Perhaps it was the distress of the storm and their abject vulnerability that caused them, finally, to ask the real question. The disciples finally asked. “Who is this?” not because they hadn’t had the information they needed in order to know who Jesus was. They had seen him heal, cast out demons, bring life from death. What was new about the experience on the sea? 

They were displaced. The day-to-day things that held them up were suddenly and forcefully removed; they were thrown off balance and into crisis. But the crisis—the unprotected, frightful moment—was what bumped them into seeing Jesus clearly. The moment of fear became the moment of clarity because they stayed in the boat and saw Jesus. Maybe I had never needed Jesus to be fully God and fully good until now, when my life puddled at my feet. The pull between fear and faith centered on Jesus’ identity: Who is this? And will he bring good or are we just on our own out here? 

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06.  Small Steps

The season felt long. The temptation was to jump in and make my own good. If God is not acting the way I hoped then maybe it’s incumbent on me to get what I need and want. The appeal of this presented itself daily. If I could just find the right job I would have a chance to keep our life as it was and avoid the embarrassment of loss. If I control the future, I can at least make sure the refrigerator is stocked. I go after things for myself because of fear—that I can’t or won’t have something good because God might be holding out on me, he’s not hearing me (am I so sinful that God won’t listen to me?), or he’s not as good as I thought. The problem is, of course, that if I secure my own good, I know it will be a tiny, limited good that disjoins me from what Jesus is creating. 

Faith offers incremental progress. It’s not a triumphant, polished story—at least not for me, either then or now. I wish I could report that everything ended perfectly, that we came through with Job’s twenty-thousand sheep and camels. We have found work and we have food to eat in a house we own, but we’ve seen no clear multiplication of material fortune. It’s an ongoing struggle to recover from the debt we incurred. Sometimes, I still feel jangled and on edge about money, working as I do in funded ministry positions. I feel bad that our kids have had to move several times and at sensitive points in their development. I don’t know if or how we’ll ever retire. 

I guess I could be—maybe sometimes I am—afraid of the difficulty still lurking. We could attempt to protect ourselves. We could make it our strongest goal to get ahead of trouble. But our own plans are clearly faulty, and God does not offer protection from trouble; he offers salvation from it. I think faith is this. I think it’s staying in the boat with Jesus when it’s really tempting to launch my own life raft.