It hurts, this chest-constricting, vision-darkening, hope-deferring season.  It’s not that I intentionally dwell on it…it just kind of blindsides me when I’m trying to do life-as-usual.  It’s getting the wind knocked out of me because the laundry detergent is low and I realize I have to spend $10 to get more, and then I realize that $10 doesn’t actually matter when our need will be thousands, and that just to get through one month.  It’s the tears that fill my eyes when I think about piano lessons, or chickens, or choir performances, or baseball, or anything else that might be wrenched from my kids if we have to leave to make ends meet.

Financial belt tightening won’t do us any good.  We’re not just facing a little, one-time, budgetary shortfall.  We’re facing nothing.

I don’t say that to try to convince anyone of how bad we have it, I say it because I’m trying to wrap my mind around it.  I’m trying to figure out how to have faith for all of that nothing to turn into something that can sustain us here.  I know it doesn’t matter that for 7 weeks there’s been almost nothing in the way of hope-giving possibility, that it just takes one open door, except passing closed door after closed door makes it hard to believe there will ever be anything different.