Failures, foreclosures, funks, and faith

I work in high end furniture sales, and as you can well imagine, times have been hard the last few years.  My income has dropped over 70%, and most of my co-workers have seen similar declines. The fear and concern is almost palpable.  The sales people talk - only partially in jest - about buying RV's and parking them on a communally owned piece of property.  They would share everything, and everyone would have a skill.  One would be the cook, one the gardener, one the handy man, one the house cleaner.  They would literally circle their wagons against the darkness, uncertainty, and despair of life in this economy.
All the sales people in my store are dependent on someone walking through the door who needs furniture, and - here's the rub - is willing to pony up and pay for it.  One of my friends, who is a believer in Jesus like me, had a great customer the other day.  A woman came in who had just sold her home and all the furniture in it, and she now wanted to buy all new furniture for her new home.    It was my friend's turn in the rotation, so she got this customer.  She was so grateful to God.  She said "God is so good!"

Hmmph....?  Was she saying God is so good because He did this really good thing for her?

My friend did what we do in our job; she went out to the client's home, measured all her rooms, talked with her about exactly what she wanted, went to her old house to see how she had furnished that, and then spent about 8 hours getting a presentation all ready for this client who said that she would come in on Saturday, checkbook in hand, to buy everything. On Saturday the client came in as promised.  But instead of checkbook in hand, she was carrying ads from the newspaper.  Ads from other furniture companies.  Ads that she pointed to and said "I really like this, and its a lot cheaper than your store.  And I'm really old and don't really care about the quality....." blah blah blah woof woof woof...... She left our store without buying a single item, and my friend, who had two days worth of time into this lady earned exactly zero dollars.  Nada. Zip.  (Well, at the end of the month she would be paid minimum wage for those hours.)

How did she respond?  First she said, "I need some chocolate."  Then she said,  "God is so good".

That is faith.

The last couple decades of my life have been full of failures, funks, even foreclosure.  I started those decades firmly believing God is good.  But by 2010, when our little U-haul, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the driveway of the little house that had represented our life savings, the little house that now belonged to the bank, I had quit believing that God was good in any way that was meaningful in my life.  I believed theologically that He was good.  I knew that His goodness would eventually triumph in this world.  But in the "rubber meets the road"  nitty gritty details of my life, I could not see that his goodness was making any difference.

Talk about a funk.  But God has been teaching me that the truth of His goodness DOES make a difference in my life every day.  The missing ingredient in my walk with God was faith.  Faith takes the truth of God and rests in it, regardless our cirumstances, regardless of what I see at the moment.  "We look not at the things which are seen, but the things that are unseen.  For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal."  Pie in the sky, you say?  Well, let's discuss that.

Is Chaos in Life Normal and Expected?

       Welcome to my blog!  For a woman like myself, almost 62, right brained rather than left, and not used in any way to social networking, this is a BIG step in my life.  Honestly, I will be dependent on  my long suffering sons to help me navigate this new forum.  But I have written a book, and they tell me that I am now required to maintain a social  networking presence.  Why exactly that is, is beyond me, but I do know that God has given me a story to tell, so here goes!  This blog is going to explore on a sometimes daily, sometimes weekly basis, how the reality that GOD IS ENOUGH works out in day to day life.  What do I mean by "God is Enough?"  That is what we will explore together.  I hope we will have great dialogue around that truth, and all the other questions raised by it.
        I have had to learn afresh that God is enough, because my husband, Mike, and I screeched up on retirement age with our house in foreclosure, a resulting bankruptcy, and the very live reality of perhaps having to live in our car...(no small feat since the only car the bankruptcy left us is a Scion XB.)  You can read our story in my book "Is God Enough?...one woman's journey through gain and loss" which is available on Amazon.
       The point is, life is chaotic, restive, painful, exhilarating, tenuous, fraught with misery, riddled with joy, sometimes all in the same day.  How does one deal with this without going nuts, going postal, or succumbing to despair.  How do you make sense out of life hunkered down in your home awaiting the wrath of Hurricane Irene?  How does my co-worker make sense out of life as her husband battles stage 4 cancer?  How does my son make sense out of his life as a single dad, alone with 2 beautiful children who have been abandoned by their mother?  How does the retiree watching the gyrations of the stock market, feeling every downturn like a taser to his heart, make sense of his increasingly meager nest egg?  How does my older son, who has been unemployed for over two years now, and who watches his wife's commission be cut again and again by corporate greed, who never knows if there will be food for dinner for his family that night, how does he make sense of life?
       I invite you to explore these issues with me, to dialogue, and rant.  Let's discover together if there is a God, and if He is enough.