After the Inspiration

One of my sisters is an amazing woman. (Actually all of my sisters are amazing women, but right now I'm just going to talk about one of them.)

My sister Andra has 8 kids. That, in and of itself, is amazing to me. But even more amazing to me is the fact that Andra and her husband moved to this house when their first child was a baby, and moved out of it after their 8th baby was born.

This house has 4 small bedrooms, is less than 2000 square feet, and the only way they managed to live there so long was by adding on to the kitchen in back of the house. This was one crowded house, and my sister handled the close quarters with a lot of grace.

Several years ago she and her husband decided that it was time to divide their acreage and build another house on it--a house that would be big enough for all of their children. The process was long, laborious, and expensive. There were problems at every step of the way and my sister and brother-in-law relied on a lot of prayer to help them know which direction to take. It was also a tremendous amount of work for both of them--most of my sister's part of that work (getting the old house ready to sell, which involved huge amounts of packing away and painting while her husband built a garage onto the old house to make it more marketable) having to be done during her last pregnancy or in the first few months after the baby was born. I was astounded at what she was able to accomplish. Again, she gave credit to the Lord for endowing her with extra stamina for the task at hand. And in the end, it all seemed worth it.

She and her family moved into the new house and she said that for the first time in years she felt like she had room to breathe. They staged the old house, hoping that it would sell quickly. They desperately needed the equity from the old house to bring the mortgage on the new house down to a manageable level.

Instead the sub-prime mortage crisis happened.

After months and months of praying that the house would sell quickly, they decided that they would go ahead and rent the old house and wait for a better time to sell. This at least meant that someone else was paying the mortgage payment on the old house, but they were unable to free up the equity from the old house to get a lower mortgage payment on the new house.

Now my sister, mother of 8 with 3 children preschool children, is looking for a part-time job. Her husband already works 2 jobs, but his income is not enough for the new, big mortgage. Something has to happen.

One of the last times I talked to her I offered the consolation that at least they are dealing with this stress from the roominess of the new house. She took no comfort in this thought, and said that she wished that she was still living in the crowded little house and had never built the big house.

Several weeks ago someone made a comment that has stuck with me. She said that we assume, when we are lead by the Lord in a particular direction, that following that guidance means that things will turn out "well" for us. We assume that feeling prompted to marry a specific person means that the marriage will go well, the spouse will be both faithful and kind. If we feel guided to take a new job then the job situation will be pleasant. And if we feel guided to build a new house, then certainly the old house will sell quickly, or at least before the pain is overwhelming. If things don't work out in these nice ways we doubt that we actually did receive revelation from the Lord--because he certainly wouldn't have put us in these difficult and painful situations.

Or would he?

I think we humans are creatures of comfort. We want it. We expect it. And when we don't get it, we are something must be wrong.

But what if God's greatest concern is not our comfort? C.S. Lewis touches on this in his book The Problem of Pain.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us ... While what we call "our own life" remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make "our own life" less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

Now I don't think by any means that God always wants us to be stressed and unhappy. I think that sometimes he provides moments of respite in our lives where things are relatively calm and problem free. But a life made entirely of these calm moments would never shape us into that thing that is our ultimate and eternal goal; becoming like him. And we know that this is his goal as well.

I once read a quote by Spencer W. Kimball that said something to the effect that if every prayer for relief of adversity was answered immediately, the entire plan of God would be thwarted.

Does this mean that God causes or leads us into every hard thing in our lives? I don't think so. Some things just happen. Some things happen as a consequence of other people's agency. But I do think that sometimes God leads us into situations because he knows that we need the growth that can occur there.

I think in the end, when Andra reaches another moment of comfort in her life, she will look back on this time and say what most of us say; that she would never want to do it again. But also that she wouldn't ever want to give up the ways that she grew or the things that she learned during this most difficult time. I'm sure that she will have learned a lot about herself, and a lot about God.