How I nearly died.

When we moved to TN to work with the parachurch organization I had been hired at, we had no idea what life was going to look like there. We had been as creative as we could manage in trying to buy a house, but given that we had very little credit history and even less verifiable income we could not get a loan. We stumbled upon a USDA grant that helped first time home buyers and had driven down several times to look at houses to no avail. We had the idea of buying an old country church and renovating into a house (a dream we still hold on to for that ‘someday’ when everything works out the way we would like). We found one old church that seemed promising. It still had all the old pews in it and everything, but we could not put together the financing. Fortunately we were eventually put in touch with a friend of the ministry who owned a house in the downtown area who was willing to rent it to us at a discounted rate.

I’ll never forget that first night pulling into town and driving up to the house. The owner left the backdoor open for us so I parked and ran around to let everyone else in. I walked in the back door and started making my way through the maze to the front, in the dark, in a house I’d never seen before. Have you ever been in one of those houses that just goes on forever? It seems like every time you open a door there’s another room or hallway or closet. This house was one of those. It was over 100 years old and over 3,000 sq. ft. I finally stumbled my way to the front door and opened it to let everyone in from the rain (oh yeah, it rained every day for the first 2 months we lived there). One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that Hannah’s middle brother also moved to TN with us. Several months back Hannah and I had gotten the wild idea to offer to put him up for a chance to get out on his own (sort-of) and pursue ministry.

After several days of getting settled in we started looking towards what things were going to look like. We knew that I would have to supplement our income from the ministry until we could raise enough support and since I had quite a bit of construction experience our landlord referred me to a friend of hers who was an architect and builder. Hannah and I went out to meet him and talk about hiring. He offered me $10/hr. That was a pretty rough pill to swallow since I had just left carpentry opportunities in St. Louis that paid twice that. Given that our options were so limited, I agreed to the amount on a trial basis.

The first day I showed up to work for this guy, he put me on a manual rebar bender with 5/8” rebar and tells me to make 500 of these special ‘s’ shaped hooks for the concrete and Styrofoam house we were building, a little different than the 2x4 stick houses I’d built all my life. Now I’m a hard worker and I always have been; most of the time when everyone else has stopped for a break I am still going at a feverish pace. I’ve been that way since high school. I don’t like hot weather, but sometimes you have to work in the heat. I get that. What I didn’t get was that the humidity in the area was not something that my body was used to, and something about the work I was doing pushed my body in a way I couldn’t handle. At the end of the first day I was walking down the little slope towards my car thinking, “Just don’t fall down. Stay up. If I fall, I won’t be able to get back up.” I’m not sure exactly how I drove the 10 miles back home on the windy mountain roads without dying, but I did. To this day I don’t know whether I suffered a heat stroke or just severe heat exhaustion, but I know I crawled in the shower with the water on cold and just sat there for what seemed like several hours. I finally crawled my way out, not feeling much better, got dressed and walked into the kitchen. Hannah was finishing up dinner and I asked, “How long was I in there?” thinking it has been hours. “About 10 minutes.” “OK, I’m going back.” And I did. I went through the same thing every day for the next three days. The builder paid me and said, “I’ll call you when I need you.” I never heard from him again.

I started in slowly at the ministry. I would go in to the office on the days we had staff meetings and staff lunch. I started trying to fill an office and quickly realized that I had a bunch of junk when I walked into my coworkers offices. Regardless, it was what we had and we would make it work. The ministry had a reimbursement policy where office supplies, computers, etc. were not taxed so we took as much of our income as we could that way. I finally had opportunity to utilize all the tips and tricks I had observed at a young age being surrounded by those who were self-employed. I learned to write everything off.

It didn’t take long before we realized that since I couldn’t handle the heat and had no other marketable skills, the best scenario for us was for Hannah to find a job. She had worked in the food-service industry for several years before we met so it seemed like a good fit. Fortunately I married an amazing woman and she got the first job she applied for at the best grossing restaurant in town. There are lots of stories that came out of there, but those will have to wait.