Overcoming Self Doubt
Before I had read Isaiah 43:1-7 I had been having doubts if I had made the right choices in my life. My husband and I had moved to New York for me to attend NYU on a full scholarship for my Masters and PhD in Biblical Archaeology. I had gotten Sarcoidosis after a dig in Jordan between the two degrees. I had sat out a year as other complications had arisen from the Sarcoidosis but had returned after feeling that God had given me the sign to continue with the pigeon in the window at church. Then, after telling God I would trust that he had a plan for my life, as I mentioned in the 'About' section, I found out I was pregnant.
I got pregnant with my son in the beginning of the second semester for my PhD and pregnant with my daughter when my son was 6 months old. I am very happy that I had my children and love them completely but the timing was not my timing but God’s. I had planned to try getting pregnant when I had finished my class work for my PhD and working on my dissertation while pregnant. Well that went out the window.
I was overwhelmed with everything. Every few weeks I had to have blood drawn from the arteries in my wrists to check the oxygen level for the baby because of the Sarcoidosis. It was an extremely painful procedure as they felt for a pulse and then would insert the needle hoping to hit the artery. If they didn’t hit it at first they would move the needle around in my wrist hitting nerves as they tried to find the artery leaving me in pain for hours. Also grad classes were in the evening and I had evening sickness for the first four months of my pregnancy and NYU didn’t let you make less than a B in any class so I ended up taking a leave of absence from school. I had been filling out the paperwork to return to school after my son was born and then found out I was pregnant with our daughter. With her birth I now had a fifteen month old and a new born. At that point I decided to give up on school. Two years later we moved back home.
It had been my husband’s idea to move home to the south because our mothers were getting on in age and thought the kids should grow up around them. We had looked into a job for him but couldn’t find anything. Then one day I was looking through the classifieds and saw an ad for a franchise in different areas, including our home town. We met with the company and it was very affordable and the line of work my husband was in. Next we met with a bank and immediately got an SBA loan to open the business which shocked our accountant. The only hurdle was to sell the house we had bought in New York and the real estate market was not good at the time. We had a real estate agent come and give us her idea of what the house could sell for but we would only break even. My husband decided to put a For Sale By Owner sign up even though it was a week before Christmas and not the best time of year to try and sell a house. He figured that people would be driving to relatives homes for the holidays and see the sign and call us after the holidays. Well as soon as the sign went up we got three offers, each more than the one before. We ended up selling it for $40,000 more than the real estate agent had said we could get. I felt surely this was God showing us that this was indeed his will.
In May I moved down with the kids and my husband continued to work in New York while I looked for a site for the business. First I rented an apartment. I ended up with a crazy couple for landlords and bought a small house in the end of August in the area the franchise had told us we would have. I had been working with the person who was the location finder for the franchise and we had found a place close to the house and was negotiating with the landlord. Well, three weeks after closing on the house corporate decided we couldn’t have that part of town and told us we could only have the opposite side of town in an area that was a tough one to break into. I was ready to pack up and go back to New York but my husband said to keep moving forward with the franchise.
I found another location but that fell through and finally we found a vacant lot that the owner was willing to do a build to suit. It was November by this time and we had just finished the plans and began building when another set back happened. My husband, who was making a good salary in New York got fired. Of all things, our old next door neighbor, who was trying to start his own business in Virginia Beach was in New York to spend the weekend with his wife and kids who were staying in the house until the business took off. He was out on his boat when he encountered a yacht broken down on the water. It was amazing that someone would be out on the water in the end of November when it’s quite cold in New York but the odds that not only my husband’s boss would be out there but that our neighbor who was supposed to be in Virginia Beach at the same time are astronomical. He stopped to help and found out it was the owner of the company that my husband worked for. Thinking my husband had moved back home with us, he tells the owner that my husband was his old next door neighbor before he moved back home to start his own business. The next day he fired my husband. I was like, “Ok God, what’s the deal? I thought this was what you wanted! One good thing to come out of it was that my husband was home for Thanksgiving and to oversee the building of the new business. However, he now was on unemployment and we ended up on the food commodities for families with children until the store opened in April of the following year. While sitting in the office to collect the food I spoke with other people there and gained a whole new respect for people who are struggling to make ends meet. What some of them had to deal with was truly heart breaking.
Two years later, and financially secure and living in a new larger home, God was speaking to me. In the past two years, especially after moving back home, I had begun to wonder “What if”. What if we had stayed in New York. What if I had returned to school and gotten my PhD. What if my husband had continued in the great job he had in New York. I missed academia and the thrill of archaeology. Had we made the right decisions? It had seemed to be God’s will with everything almost miraculously falling into place to move back home but then strange things had happened to try and thwart our plans. The question kept up, had we made a mistake.
After being overwhelmed with Isaiah 43:1-7 and God showing me that from ‘the womb have I formed you’ I began to feel less overwhelmed and then God began to show me how he had been guiding me in my life, with my being unaware of it most of the time. I asked him what was the point of my getting my undergraduate degree in Anthropology and my graduate in Biblical Archaeology if I wasn’t going to be able to do anything with it. He showed me that getting my degree in Anthropology, the study of man, was to teach me about the diversity of human beings, cultures other than my own, and to be as unbiased and open minded as possible to all people. To observe and learn from everyone around me and to learn that no one culture is better or had all the right answers as compared to another.
My graduate studies in the ancient Near East, or lands of the Bible, was to teach me about man’s history with God. To learn about the people, places and events that took place when God interacted much more closely with man. It was to equip me to understand the foundations of my religion. He had led me on a journey of knowledge, the study of man, the study of God and how the two interacted in history. He told me he had to move me from New York or he would never have been able to get through to me. I would have been too preoccupied with everything else. He had been laying a foundation. I wasn’t quite sure what that foundation was for but now I knew it was all part of his plan. I no longer have questions about “What If”. I know he has been guiding my life and though it wasn’t all smooth sailing or anything that I had planned for my life, as I heard one news anchor say, “We plan and God smiles”. After all, he’s the one who’s in control and that gives me great peace.
