We live in a small apartment in the top of a house at the top of a hill. We are surrounded by trees filled with deer, raccoons, foxes, owls, chipmunks, bunnies, squirrels, and a rainbow of bird species. We love our little apartment, and we pay a petite sum for it relative to it's location overlooking downtown Nashville. We have only two wishes: we'd like to be in the house alone, without a family living beneath us (friendly and tolerant though they may be), and we'd like a yard for our Border Collie to play in. This weekend, a coworker showed us her house that she's putting up for rent. Other than the micro-machine oven/stove combo, it seemed to perfectly fit our needs. It was as though we'd brought it into fruition through our desires. Less than a mile from where we currently live, it has nearly everything we want at a great rental rate. Within a few hours, we called my coworker to tell her we were definitely interested.
Then, a few hours after calling to claim the house for our own, my husband's face reflected his discontent. He kept asking me what I was thinking, and all I kept thinking about was how I was going to make that tiny kitchen work. My husband, though, worried that we might not be making the wisest choice financially. Although I just received a raise at my job, the new rent would suck that up and then some. In this precarious job market, with my husband working for a car dealership, we suddenly both began to worry that if he lost his job, or if I finally had an opportunity for a job in publishing that required me to take a pay cut, we'd be screwed. I wanted to believe that if we embraced the opportunity with the house and had faith that God would continue to provide us with great opportunities, our financial stability would follow. The cautious side of me saw that we could be using my raise to pay down our debt and to start an emergency fund. Perhaps the blessing was in the raise, and the house is a temptation. Perhaps everything would work out just fine in the new house, or perhaps by staying where we we are, we'll be rewarded for managing our money responsibly. All day on Sunday and all morning yesterday while we prepared for work, we debated the pros and cons. In the end, though, it just came down to the fact that the increase in rent came out to about $2,400 over the course of a year, and that's a big chunk of change towards becoming debt free and building a cushion of savings.
The book Conversations With God explains that God has given us everything we need, if only we accept it. Joel Osteen in Your Best Life Now reiterates that thought and proclaims that God wants abundance in our lives, and we must believe that God can do anything to help us gain that abundance. Dr. Wayne Dyer in The Power of Intention (which I haven't read) explains that we must open ourselves to The Source, and when we put good things out there, good things will come back to us. I believe the new book Quantum Wellness, which I would like to read, also says that. So taking all of this into account, I wanted -- oh, how I wanted -- to embrace the opportunity in that rental that we'd dreamed of, perhaps even dreamed up, and have faith that abundance would soon follow. Of all these inspirational authors, though, no one tells you how to determine when an opportunity is a good one or when a responsible decision is the better one. My husband and I thus decided that we could have complete faith in the abundance to come while using our current abundance to pay for the things we bought on credit when abundance was lacking.
A friend of mine who is going through radiation to treat breast cancer took me to lunch today. After explaining the aforementioned situation to her, she came up with a great analogy that eased my anxieties. She explained that there are jigsaw puzzles in the cancer treatment center waiting room. As she worked on one yesterday, she found a piece that seemed to fit in a hole, but it wasn't quite right. The colors were close, and the size was almost the same, but it just didn't fit. If she left it there, the whole puzzle would have been messed up. She said that perhaps the house was, for us, like that puzzle piece. It seemed so close to perfect, but it just wasn't the right fit. If we had tried to make it fit, it would have messed up the bigger picture.
She bowled me over with her wisdom. Of course, it's hard to feel too anxious about one's choices in how to best spend a raise when speaking with someone who's winning the battle against cancer . . . and who still believes that God has fantastic plans for her.
