It was a normal Thursday morning for me until my phone rang. Pushing a
shopping cart around the store with our 2 year old and a large, overflowing
cart of groceries, I answered the phone. Steven answered with, “I’ve been laid
off.” Instantly I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of panic and calm all at the
same time. My first instinct was to leave the shopping cart of groceries because we could no longer afford it. Yes, I admit, I panicked just a little bit at first. On the one hand, we were down to a pretty small income now (my piano business and part time job at church), no health insurance, 3 children to feed, and Christmas only 3 weeks away. But on the other hand, I knew Steven wasn’t living to his full potential with this job and that he desired something different. All of the
feelings encompassing those two thoughts were a lot to try to sort through.
All of a sudden our comfy life was halted and we had a decision to make. Actually, we had a lot of decisions
to make! However, the first and most important decision we had to make was
about our attitudes. Sure, we felt like we could crumple to the ground and lose
all hope. Afterall, that seemed the most natural thing to do. It felt like a
year of loss to us. We had lost our baby in a miscarriage at 12 weeks just 8
months prior to the lay off. We felt a lot of emptiness, fear, loss, and anger. The
lay off only added to those feelings. However, we knew this sense of despair
that we felt wasn’t what we wanted to control our lives. So, we made a
conscious decision to remain upbeat, lean on our faith, and make the best
decisions that we could to help us out of this situation.
Looking back on this experience we can see God’s hands all
over everything. Four months before Steven was laid off we began a new
spiritual journey at a neighboring church. When we received our new priest
assignment at our home parish that summer before his lay off, mass schedules at our church changed and we no
longer had a Wednesday evening mass to go to. Attending mass as a family on
Wednesday evenings was an important part of our week and we didn’t want it to
end due to scheduling conflicts. We decided to go to a church nearby and join
them for their Wednesday evening mass. Shortly after we started attending, we
noticed these little business card type papers in the pews. I picked one up,
read it, and immediately told Steven this was something I wanted to do. The
program was called ChristLife and they met weekly on a Sunday evening, provided
free childcare, dinner, and a night of spiritual formation. It was exactly what
I needed because I felt a gaping hole in my heart after our miscarriage. A hole
that I knew only God could fill but I couldn’t seem to get there on my own.
Steven agreed and we began the course in August.
Little did we know, this new relationship we were building
with God as a result of ChristLife was about to shake up our lives in ways we
couldn’t have dreamed about! To explain it simply, it feels a bit like God shook
the dice and rolled a new life for us. All of it seemed random, made no sense,
and wasn’t what I wanted. Of course, God isn’t a gambling man so each and every
move was purposely made in His perfect ways. But let me tell you something
friends. If you don’t want your life to change, then don’t pray. Because when
you get your prayer life in order and you start to build a relationship with
Christ, your life is going to change. That’s exactly what happened to us. Four months after beginning our ChristLife journey, Steven was laid off. Imagine putting together a puzzle. A puzzle is created whole but broken, shipped and delivered to us to be completed. There are so many pieces
and they just don’t seem to fit. One by one though, the pieces begin to join
together, forming portions of image. For a moment you can visualize what the final
picture will look like. But it is incomplete. Unfinished. Nagging at you to
keep adding pieces. So, you keep working hard until the puzzle is done. Then, in
that moment of completion, you step back and look with joy at the puzzle you
just completed. This is much how our lives have felt these past eight months. God made us whole, but He gives us pieces of our puzzle and with His guidance we do our best to put our puzzle together.
Our journey's began at our birth and we are constantly adding more of those puzzle pieces. God giving us the ChristLife program was a crucial piece of the puzzle. ChristLife was extremely important to this part of our journey and has changed our lives forever. God knew we needed some fine
tuning in our relationship with Him and so He opened our hearts to attending
this program. There were 3 retreats available to us during this program. Those retreats
were so instrumental in forming our hearts and minds to the plan God was about
to set before us. One night after attending a retreat, God spoke directly to
me. He said, “You should home school your children.” Now, of course, I didn’t know
what to think of this new and seemingly crazy idea! However, I felt immediately
like MAYBE it was coming from God. I wanted to cry because I didn’t want to do
this. But I couldn’t. Not a tear fell. Then, I decided I’d tell Steven. Surely
he’d squash this crazy idea. Nope. His response to me? “Yah, maybe you should!”
So again, my second attempt to scare myself out of this had failed. You see, my
faith wasn’t quite there yet. I wanted to follow God’s plan for us but I never
in my wildest dreams thought that this is where it was going and I didn't have a clue what to think of it. Not only that,
but I questioned God. It didn’t make sense to me. Why would God be asking me to
homeschool? Right now of all times! We didn’t even have a steady income. Surely
He was mistaken. As we all know though, God doesn’t make mistakes so I decided maybe I was the one making a mistake. Maybe this wasn’t from God afterall. I needed proof. A sign. I
wasn’t about to jump into this new world without 100% certainty that this was
from God.
We gave it time. We gave it prayer. We gave it to our new
friends at ChristLife and our family and asked them to pray with us and for us. Time went on
and I felt less convicted about it. I really started to doubt that this was
from God and I shared those feelings with my friend, Nicole. Her response to me
was to persevere. She told me I’d made it through a lot and that I needed to persevere, keep praying and persevere. She said that word “persevere” so many times that I
decided I would make it my word to pray with and meditate on. Later that same
night she sent me a screenshot of her daughter’s math homework. One of the
story problems was titled “Perseverance”. I was still a hard headed, stubborn
lady at this point and I shrugged it off as a crazy coincidence. Then I read
the problem. The two girls referenced in the problem were Nicole, her name, and
Molly, my name. That was not a coincidence. You see, things like this don’t
just happen. God has his Hands in everything and again, a piece of our puzzle
was connected. He gave her those words to share with me that morning knowing
that the point would be driven home later. In that moment, I knew that
homeschooling was exactly what God wanted us to do. It still didn’t make any
sense to me but I was glad to be doing my best to follow God’s plan for our
family.
Time went on and we still had just this one piece of our
puzzle figured out. I was going to homeschool our kids, we still had limited
income, no insurance, and no real plan. People would ask how things were going
and I would feel a bit foolish because our “plan” sounded stupid to me so I
didn’t share it. I knew in my heart we
were where we needed to be in our faith journey and so I leaned on that. God
was taking the pieces of our puzzle and slowly fitting them all together. I
mentioned earlier that we had made a conscious decision to have a good
attitude, full of hope and we weren’t going to let despair in. That was
something I felt like God took control of by using the people in our lives. We
had people bringing us cash at Christmas time, gift cards were sent, people
took Steven’s resume and shared it at their places of employment, they sent
constant emails about job openings, people brought us food. The support was
everywhere. We couldn’t escape it if we tried. As soon as I would start to let
despair in, God would send the right person to help us with our immediate need.
I am forever grateful to everyone who answered that call that God gave them to
help us. They probably didn’t even realize it, but God sent them to us to lift
us up when we were down. There isn’t one doubt in my mind that they received
Holy Whispers (that’s what I call them) to help the Weiss family and to know that
they answered that call for us is the most humbling experience. I pray I will
always stay humbled by this experience.
At this point in our journey, Steven had sent out hundreds of job
applications but received nothing in return. After his severance ran out, he decided it was time to get a job anywhere. He would take anything. He interviewed
for a part time job at Academy Sports and was offered a job on the spot. It
wasn’t a huge income, but it was something and I was happy for him to have
something to get up for every day again. It takes a toll for the provider of the
family to go through a lay off and I was genuinely worried about him. Not to mention
that he had lost the baby in February and then his mom was diagnosed with colon
cancer shortly after his job loss. That’s a lot for one guy to handle. I was excited to see him working at
the gun bar at Academy doing something he loved to get his mind off of all of
the stress. He continued applying for other jobs but nothing was a great fit. In
the pit of my stomach, I had this sinking feeling that we were going to be
moving. It seemed to be the only reason God would be calling me to homeschool our
kids in the midst of such a mess. The thought of moving made me sick. We love our home, our community, our
friends, our church. Everything. We felt so at home and I didn’t want to move.
I tried not to think about it. I never even told anyone about it. I hated that
it might be a reality and I tried to hide from it as best I could.
Finally, we heard about a scholarship program through WSU
Tech. We decided to check into it and right away we felt like it was the
perfect answer to our problems. The programs were a much better fit for Steven
than his Accounting degree, the scholarship would pay 100% tuition, and he would
most likely be hired by a local company before completion of the program.
Finally, we felt like we had a vision for our future. In May, he started
classes for an eight week program at WSU Tech. He enjoyed what he was learning
about and I was so excited to see him with a new goal that made him happy. He was working
so hard! He would leave the house at 6:30 a.m. for work at Academy. He would go
straight from work to evening classes. He usually got home around 10:30 p.m.
and would wake up and do the same thing the next day. It was a long, yet quick,
8 weeks. The kids missed their daddy, I missed my husband, he missed all of
their summer baseball games, he missed seeing his kids in the morning and
helping to tuck them in at night. We were all just getting by but we kept that
hope and faith that God was going to take care of us. Afterall, we made a promise to ourselves that we were going to stay optimistic and trust in God. We also knew we weren’t
the first to experience this and that there were others in much greater need
than us. Knowing that we weren’t alone is what helped us through. I never once heard Steven complain. He worked
so hard for our family and I am so proud of him! Before he completed the
courses, he had job offers from two companies. All of a sudden we went from
nothing to two incredible offers! Praise the Lord we were so excited to have
these offers! We now had our final piece of the puzzle. Well, the final piece
of this puzzle. We know God has much more in place for us but the end of
this particular journey is about over. Our prayers were answered.
On August 9th, 2019, Steven
begins a new career at Spirit Aerosystems and on September 3rd the
kids and I begin our new journey with homeschooling. So where did homeschooling
fit into all of this? Turns out, Steven was offered a second shift job. That
means he will go to work at two o’clock in the afternoon and will get home
around midnight. That crazy, homeschool idea? Well, it ended up being the
perfect piece of our puzzle. If the kids were attending school as they’d done
in the past, they would never see their daddy and he would have never seen
them. I’m not sure we would have been able to accept the job offer without the security
of homeschool. God’s hands? ALL. OVER. THIS. We are now looking back on this past year and we see how the pieces of our puzzle gently fell in place while we were busy living in our life. Our puzzle is complete and we are looking at it with joy, happiness, humility, love and hope.
"...My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ, for whenever i am weak, I am strong." 2 Conrinthians 12:8-10
