A Place To Go

It was a Friday morning. I was sitting in my living room drinking a cup of coffee when I heard a loud commotion outside my back door. When I went to investigate, I found that an eviction notice had been nailed to the door. I was to be out of my house in one week!

Okay, what was the story, you’re wondering? Why were you evicted?

Good question! The answer is not a simple one. To give you a complete picture I have to go back a ways. Three years before, in the midst of an event that I was producing I refinanced the house. I had to refinance, because everything was catching up to us . . . financially, that is. To continue operating, I needed some breathing room.

All I could get at the time was a variable rate mortgage. The agent said I would have to refinance again in a couple years. The variable rate went up to over 10 percent. Our payments were choking us, so I found an agent who was going to line up a fixed rate mortgage.

But someone close to me insisted that just to make sure we were getting the best deal, I should check with another agent, one I had used before. Unfortunately, that was our undoing. This agent said to wait a month because the rates were going to come down. This was early in 2008, that fateful year when the real estate market crashed. And that’s what happened. After I waited a month, everything crashed. Then I couldn’t get a new mortgage at all.

Soon, we couldn’t make the payments any more, and I was introduced to a Christian lawyer who examined my existing mortgage and said it was illegal. His advice to me was to stay in the house while he worked on the mortgage in the courts, to try to get the inevitable eviction reversed. But the courts did not rule in our favor.

These were the circumstances that led up to the eviction notice, nailed to my door.

So, I had to be out in a week. Boy, what an awful week! We got it all into storage just in time. When that was done, then I had to figure out, “Where was I going to live, now?”

There was a Christian retreat facility, a farm near Pine City, Minnesota, owned by a man named Mike. I had stayed there before, but I didn’t have Mike’s number and didn’t know anyone that had it. So, I drove the fifty miles up I-35 to the farm and knocked on Mike’s door.

What do you know . . . Mike was home! He came to the door, and the conversation could have been viewed as very funny, in another time, another life.

“Are you still doing the cabin thing?” I asked. The answer was, “Yes.” I explained to him that my wife had left me, and I had just lost my house . . . and frankly, I didn’t have any place to go.

So Mike put me up in a 12 by 15 cabin, and that was where I lived off and on for the next seven and a half months. The cabin had electric heat, so it was quite comfortable, except that the bathroom was in the next building. Later on when it snowed, I kept my boots by the door, slipped them on several times through the night and sloshed though the snow to get to the bathroom.

I was officially homeless. The cabin was 15 dollars a night. Sometimes I had it, and sometimes I didn’t. Mike was gracious enough to let me stay and pay him later on when I got some money.

I did a lot of thinking there . . . how should I have done things differently, and how in the world did I end up like this? I was trying to run a ministry, and we had seen thousands of young people come to Christ, but there wasn’t enough money, and I had ultimately ended up homeless. How in the world did that happen?

Most of my evenings were spent lying on the bed in the cabin with my computer, my only form of entertainment. I would find something free on the internet that I could watch, to distract me from my predicament. But over and over again I would replay the events of the last few years, and try to figure out how I could have made better decisions so as to avoid being homeless, holed up in a cabin, trying to figure out the next move.

Among my musings was something that had happened a few years earlier, when I was still in business, attempting to land a large corporate project, sweating my way through the proposal process. When I went to the park to pray, the Lord spoke very clearly to me, “The measure of a man is not what he does when everything is going smoothly, but what he does when his back is against a wall.”

Uh-huh. Well I guess now, I would find out what I was made of, wouldn’t I? The fact that my back was against a wall was an understatement. I grinned as I thought about that. Well, at least I could say I had a wall to put my back up against. I was in a warm cabin and not out in the snow and cold.

In the middle of that mayhem, I produced an outreach event in Jordan, Minnesota. I reasoned that what Satan was trying to do was stop me, so I was determined to call his bluff and keep going. When the event timeline was nearing the performance date, I was able to take some of my pay, and I rented the bottom of a duplex in Shakopee, Minnesota. The next two years were . . . “interesting.” There were several days when I didn’t have enough money to buy a cup of coffee, since my credit was toast and I didn’t have any credit cards.

A few times I didn’t have any “consumable” food and my car was repossessed three times. I just kept going one day at a time because, what other option did I have?

Now, here’s the really strange part: Looking back on those years I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

Why? Well, it’s hard to explain. I think it’s because it was just me and God. Some of my closest friends kind of turned their back on me, because they felt, I guess, my desperate situation was all my fault. There were a few close friends who bailed me out over and over again and stood by me. That was the other side of the situation.

Really though, what was so great about the situation was that for the most part, it was just me and God, everyday grinding it out. Nearly every day I needed a miracle or at least an intervention form God. I can’t list them all here. It would take far too many pages for a readable article.

The guy who worked on my computers called me one morning and asked for my address. “I was praying this morning,” he said, “and the Lord told me to help you.” Two days later 100 dollars came in the mail. If not for that check, I would have been flat broke.

Once I had to go up north to preach. The problem was that I didn’t have gas money to get there. But I felt led to call a brother. The first thing out of his mouth was that he had some money for me and could we meet? He gave me 40 dollars. That was enough to get me part of the way, so off I went. Then, I stopped at a Christian coffee house about half the way there. The owner, who I knew somewhat, gave me a free lunch and then slipped me a 20 dollar bill before I left. That was enough to get to my preaching assignment and of course, I was paid for preaching.

Another time, I hired a law firm to fend off my creditors. When I told the guy what I was going through, he talked to his superiors and called me back. He said, “We’re going to pay 2000 dollars on your debt.” When have you ever heard of a law firm doing that?

There was a time I thought the rest of my life would be spent paying what I owed from the financial meltdown I went through. Well, a few years have passed, the Lord has given me a marvelous, supporting wife and except for a few loose ends, I am nearly all out of debt.

Now, I am dreaming again. I am actually wondering if God will let me do outreach events again. There is nothing more exciting than to see young people rushing to the altar to give their lives to Christ.

So, what have I learned from this dire journey? Don’t waste a single day of your life to bitterness or self-pity. If you look hard enough, keep your chin up and stay thankful, there is a blessing in every single day you occupy this planet.

Remember, the Apostle Paul suffered unfathomable hardship through his years of preaching the Gospel. Yet, he wrote some great stuff and said some outrageously optimistic things, one of the greatest being Romans 8:31, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

Remember the scripture often on your “dreaming journey.”

Photo taken by Lorraine