I can’t make this stuff up. Saturday night, we found that our freezer had no power. We opened it to find the most gut wrenching smell coming from it. It had been at LEAST a week since we had checked it, maybe two. It was evident that it may have been that long since the GFCI up current from it had popped. And we missed it. Hundreds of dollars in meat… gone. It’s what we had planned to use to help curb our grocery bill as I did THOUSANDS of dollars in surgery and physical therapy starting next month.

Side note, typing that or saying it out loud makes me want to puke. Almost as bad as the smell of the freezer did. Surgery is becoming increasingly intimidating as we get closer.

I was frustrated. Not at anyone in particular, just that it feels like we are always battling to get financially stable for longer than 6 months. This… this was another big money hit amongst the sea of hundred dollar fixes. We need to replace a car windshield. We had to buy a new tire unexpectedly. We have to take apart the camber bolt in my tire and pay for a second alignment. My husband’s car needs shocks and struts and ANOTHER alignment also. The check engine light in his car is on. My auxiliary battery is going out. Surgery. Physical therapy which is $50 every time I go. The shower door in our bathroom needs to be replaced. We just replaced both bathroom shower heads and such. It just seems like a never ending to-do of fixes that all cost a few hundred. It sucks. But the enemy knows finances are one of my worry spots. There always seems to be an emergency that wipes us out.

I paused and started saying “Thank you” for the fact it was not worse. We normally process half a cow every other year and if we had done that, we would have just gotten a half cow delivered and it too would have spoiled. I was talking with my husband sharing my frustrations and talking about how we have to be different and he began shutting down. Ladies, the enemy is after your man’s ability to provide. All he could hear was the enemy telling him “it’s not enough”.

We spent an hour picking up the pieces, planning for the disposal of it all without gagging out our neighbors and then we laid down in bed. Silently. My husband finally spoke through the silence. He apologized for getting upset with me and said the freezer had always been a “sure thing” for him and all of these issues were a glaring problem that he wasn’t being the provider when he got home from work. And he felt his heart grumpy at me when there was no reason for it.

Suddenly, it made sense.

That’s the whole point. The freezer breaking is what God was using to wake us up and show us how I was starting to not trust Him with our finances and how my husband was only providing the finances. (I got my husband’s permission to share this story btw). I found myself on my knees again the next morning saying “God break the freezer if that’s what it takes”. I think it would be easy to blame the enemy. I think it would be easy to be angry with God about all of the hits we have been taking. Don’t get me wrong, the enemy is prowling and probably has a hand in some of it. But also, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, God is breaking our comfort to call us into refinement and intimacy.

We are called to be different. The wind and waves still come, we just get to choose to trust and hope in someone bigger than us.

I find myself singing “Magnify” by We Are Messengers. I want nothing in this life if it makes me comfortable and complacent. I want nothing that becomes an idol or keeps me from God. If He has to put us in a place of discomfort and we have to loose some things to find Him, then yes and amen. Take it all. If it takes a hot freezer and hundreds of dollars in lost meat to trust Him better and to realize where we are falling short, then I will sing praise. Because He is greater than anything I can gain…

Under The Sun.