Winter. I am entering my twenty-sixth month now. Have you ever read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? In the beginning the land of Narnia is in a perpetual winter. Or perhaps you have read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter. The family almost starved to death due to seven months of blizzards.
My winter actually started in a blizzard – December of 2006. I had just become pregnant with our sixth child, David, in November. (Being just over forty and pregnant is completely different from being just over twenty and pregnant.) In mid December it snowed, and snowed, and snowed and snowed. It seemed like the blizzards just came back to back until March. There were weeks in which we literally couldn’t get a work truck out of the garage. I took a hard fall on the ice and landed on my head. My old, pregnant body just didn’t seem to want to bounce back.
And then David came in July. You don’t find many mothers who are as seasoned as I am with newborns. He had colic like nothing I had ever seen before. The first six months of his life were unbelievable. The unending screaming was unbearable. In that period I am confident that I rarely slept more than four hours in any given 24 hour period. And those four hours were never lumped together. In August of that year, the husband of one my closest friends died after a two year battle with lung cancer. I also experienced the complete betrayal of someone I trusted during that time period.
Then I spent February and March of 2008 trying to run our office completely by myself (a job that six months prior to this was handled by one full-time and one part-time employee) while homeschooling two junior highers and caring for two little babies. As soon as I was able to hire someone to replace myself in the office, I found myself having to mediate two very emotional complex situations that were not related to our family or business. I had spent the past few years pouring myself out to a family that really needed some extra love. The teenage son got into trouble and we had to make some very hard decisions in order to protect other people. This caused the family to turn on us like a rabid wolves.
Then as soon as everything from that incident settled down, we had to face the consequences from the betrayal that happened when David was an infant. This meant sitting down with the IRS and making a payment installment agreement. This was one of the most frustrating and time consuming things that you can imagine. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. After that agreement was reached, the revenue agent with whom we were working decided that she wasn’t going to keep her end of the bargain. Even though our corporation has faithfully made EVERY payment in full and on time, she has decided to try to collect that same money on us personally. The tax guy that we hired to help us with this mess has never seen anything like this in the twelve years that he has been doing this. We have an appeal set for the end of this month.
My soul is weary.
There has been very little rest emotionally, physically and financially these last twenty-six months. And one may ask, “Where was your God in all of these things?” And the answer clearly is right in the middle. He has been in the middle of it all. Holding us. Teaching us. Strengthening us. Keeping us relatively sane. Loving us. His tender mercy with us has taught us how to be merciful to others. I am sure he is taking what was meant for evil and using it for His good. I have no idea what His plans are for us, but I trust Him. He is faithful.
But it is time for this to end. Time for rest. Time for us not to find a challenge around every corner. Everything within me is crying out for rest. Time for winter to be over and for spring to begin.
