#1 Rule

Keep your faith. It's that simple! Life is a roller coaster of ups and downs which you cannot control, leaving you helpless and frustrated sometimes. All the more reason to let go and let God take over. He will ALWAYS provide, and he has a plan for you. We've all had many times when things didn't go as planned, but in the end it turned out for the better.

For example, Eli and I had planned for an easy, natural birth with little intervention. After all, I'm young and healthy, had no problems during the pregnancy. I followed every nutrition and resting suggestion, and exercised practically everyday. We got wrapped up in preparing the nursery, washing the little clothes, and reading about how babies are wonderful.

Then one day Eli's company started to go under, and he was laid off along with half of his coworkers. This made two unemployed people, as I had resigned as a teacher at the end of the year. Two weeks later my water broke, randomly when I was 6 months along (now they think it was due to infection). When we went to the hospital, I thought we would be going home in a few hours after they gave me some medicine to fix the problem. Boy were we wrong! 48 hours of labor later, our beautiful Emily Beatrice was born. The labor as you could imagine had a lot of intervention, and things were out of my control. This was not the way I envisioned it!

Emily was swept away before I could even see her. We held her for the first time 7 days later. Again, not the way I thought it would be. Leaving her at the hospital for 82 days was not what I had in mind either. Of course we could have said "God, why me?" and probably did a few times.

But look at the result: the sweetest little miracle there ever were. And since Eli was unemployed, he was able to visit Emily in the hospital everyday for the first 3 weeks until we started temp jobs. He was also able to dedicate more time to studying, as he was taking 13 hours of grad classes at the time. To top it off, Eli found a job through another parent whose daughter was in the NICU. We relied on God to get us through, had to let go of control, but he had a better plan for us in mind.

Finances are often the same. Some months we are in the red, but some months we are able to save. No matter what though, we have faith that God will provide, and He ALWAYS pulls through!

Do you have a similar story of learning to trust in God's Will when everything has gone wrong?