Curve ball

   I had no idea what to name this post. I've been wanting to share why I left this blog for awhile but could not until a few weeks ago, and then I was not ready. I started to name this post "a year of growth" because that certainly defines what we have been through, but during these weeks of deliberation, it feels much more dramatic than that, the Lord threw us a curve ball we never expected.

Anyone who has read this blog long enough knows that after having four beautiful boys (and one child in heaven) in 6 years and living in five states, my husband and I were blessed with another child and lost her early in the second trimester. That began a year of losses, five in all, before the Lord blessed us again and we had a beautiful fifth son. Our fifth son was born October 30 of '14 and we rang in the new year enjoying our family and settling in to our new normal. Life felt good, my husband and I were both finally in our 30's and out of the "tumultuous 20s", and we started the new year off right by taking a Dave Ramsey Financial Freedom seminar.

Dave Ramsey changed our lives. For our first 10 years of marriage we thought we had a grip on finances. We used credit cards "responsibly", lived within our means, and put extra towards debt to get it paid down faster. And yet, we were ALWAYS IN DEBT. Every year we knew by July we would be sunk in credit card debt. Our tax return the following year was always to bail us out again before we began the march towards stacking up even more debt. See, we THOUGHT we used credit cards responsibly, but since we didn't have an emergency fund, we were always sunk in debt at the slightest unexpected expense. Dave Ramsey changed that. We had been avoiding him like the plague because we were worried about things we had heard. Dave Ramsey would never let us buy anything ever again and we would have to live like poor people. Except that wasn't true. And now for the first time in our lives we not only have the freedom to spend, but we have not had one ounce of credit card debt all year long. To top it off, we have an emergency fund with more savings than we ever knew possible.

So, we began the year feeling the glorious freedom that comes from a plan that WORKS to get rid of debt once and for all. We were feeling like adults, settling in for that stage in parenting that flows between family play time, school lessons, church, and meals around the table. These are the good years right? And then came our curve ball...