I Dare You To Eat It

And that’s exactly what we wanted to do, but we could not find one!

In 1989 my husband, Mike, had just graduated from college and we could not find a ‘good’ job. With three children and the fourth on the way, the best we could do at the time was to cut our losses. We sold our modest condo in Las Vegas and moved across the street. It was a pretty big street.

I’ll never forget when our oldest, at the wise age of 3 1/2, asked, “Mommy, why have we moved to this stinky place?” Nevermind that before we moved in we paid to have the carpets professionally cleaned, twice. Still, I learned to not kneel on the floor when I fixed the girls’ hair. The supposedly clean carpet actually left marks on the knees of my pants.

The police patrolled the street at least twice a day. One horrible night, while Mike was out…driving a taxi cab with his college education, I anxiously wondered when I should call the police to come deal with the couple upstairs as they fought hour after hour. Another night the police did show up but only to remove the body after a drug overdose.

Times were tough. All over. I learned some things. But man! We hated that place. The only good part, and I mean THE ONLY GOOD PART, was that financially, we were not digging a hole for ourselves. We had done our best to prepare for a good job but when we couldn’t find one we made a course correction. We moved into the home we could afford. We stopped digging.

The ‘new’ apartment only had two tiny, TINY bedrooms. We made it work for our three tiny daughters by squeezing a twin bed into the second room, so that it was touching the wall on three sides. Then I made up the bed sideways, instead of the normal way. When we tucked the three little girls in at night they looked like little burritos. It wasn’t great but it worked.

And it didn’t last forever. Some months later, we moved back to Utah, and we were able to rent a small two bedroom home in a much better neighborhood. We still didn’t have enough room, or enough money, but we had a much better job and our financial situation slowly began to improve.

I guess I’ve shared all this because I’m worried about the young families who are struggling with the lack of good jobs in today’s economy. We know how that feels. What worked for us was to continue to serve, be prayerful, work as hard as we could, and be willing to make the difficult decisions. We learned how to focus on life rather than lifestyle.