We’ve just gotten back from the doctor, because, for days, my throat has held barbed wire or shards of broken glass, and my fever is out of control and I’ve lost two work days to sleep.

We’re turning onto the street that leads to our house, shaking our heads at the strep throat diagnosis, when the air conditioner on the van—the only vehicle we have—stops working, and a noise starts following us home.

A noise that means something is wrong with our van.

My husband spends hours trying to figure out how to take out an old, messed-up compressor and put in a new one—a new one he bought with a credit card, because God knows we don’t have it in our checking account.

All this after breaking a foot and having sick kids and logging two months without any steady income, just side jobs here and there, and I tell a friend, “Sometimes I feel like the universe is just throwing one thing after another in our path, asking us how resilient we are. And all I want to do is hold up my middle finger.”

Five months ago we had our sixth baby. Two days after he slid into our lives, I was laid off my job. We blew through the severance (since the job never paid that much anyway). There used to be savings, because I always obsessively saved, making sure we lived on the lowest dollar possible so we could hide money away for a moment like this one. But here we are, with that buffer nearly gone, and fixing the car will take more than we’ve pulled in this month. Again.

My anxiety is so high I have a panic attack every time I think about the electric bill and the mortgage and what it takes to feed six boys in the summer. Usually those attacks come late at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep and those ugly words wrap around my neck: How are we going to do this?

I feel sad and terrified. Mostly I feel angry. Angry that we’re here, angry that the plans we believed were God’s plans don’t seem to be working, angry that God’s promises don’t apply to us.

We didn’t use our money selfishly. We gave generously to the church. Even now, even when we’re pulling in zero income ($300 on a good month), we’re supporting some missionary friends and six World Vision kids so they can have a better future—because no matter how quickly it makes the backup money run out, I can’t stop doing it. I can’t.

We’ve given everything to follow the call God put on our lives, and yet here we are, talking about the very real possibility of selling our house to keep ahead of the bank. I’ve never felt so angry in my life.

///

A month ago, I walked up to the front of my church, where those prophetic prayer people waited, and I swallowed the pride that gets in the way of asking for help, and I asked for help. Prayer this time. I could handle asking for prayer, if only barely. More than prayer? No way.

“I get this picture that you are not sitting at God’s feet waiting for an answer,” said one of the women, a good friend of mine. “I see you grabbing onto his collar and screaming your desperation into his face.”

I just nodded, not daring to speak, because, yes, that’s exactly what I did that morning. Exactly what I’ve done every morning for the last four months. Shouted at him. Screamed at him. Cried, raged, begged.

And every morning there is NOTHING.

My friend also said there was such great pain in this foggy season not because the money wasn’t steady (or there, really), but because something in my childhood had felt exactly like this, too. And at first I tried to ignore that piece of it, because what’s important now is trying to figure out a way to feed my family, not trying to heal some old childhood wound.

We got home, and it was time to balance the checkbook, and I opened the email with the electric bill. The bill was $143.18.

An old friend of ours used to believe the numbers 143 were God’s way of communicating with us across time and space. I love you, they said. 143. But there was a bill and a checkbook that didn’t have enough money to pay it, and what did that mean for me?

I started crying, shaking my head, saying the only thing I could think to say. “But do you really, God? Because this doesn’t feel like love. It feels a whole lot like abandonment.”

Sometimes numbers are just numbers.

///

When I was just a girl, three years old, or four, maybe, my mom and dad took my brother and sister and me to a water park. Or maybe it was just a neighborhood pool. My memory gets fuzzy with some of the details. Others are crystal clear.

My sister was a baby, so she stayed off to the side with my mom, while my dad told my brother and me that we could go down the massive slide on the other side of the pool. It was a tunnel slide, with all kinds of twists and turns. I watched my brother slide down so my dad could catch him. I was content to watch, too afraid to try. But my dad wanted me to try.

He walked me to the top, sat me on his lap, and wrapped his arms around me. He said, “I won’t let you go.” Then we were tearing down the slide, and the bottom was getting too close, and I was screaming terror.

A tower of water slammed into us. And my dad let go.

He let go.

///

He would let go in other ways over the years. There would be the day he decided he wanted a new family and all those days after, passing without a single word from him. There would be birthdays and graduations and an aisle I would walk down on the arm of my stepfather, who was as proud as any father could be.

When a parent leaves and doesn’t look back, what he’s saying is, Figure it out on your own.

Figure it out on my own. How I wish I could.

It’s not surprising that I would have this picture of God, too. That there were more important people for him to be concerned with. That I did not matter in the lineup of human beings who needed him. That he could not be bothered with remembering my birthday or paying my mortgage or making sure my kids were cared for.

And then came this last son, born the day before my birthday so God could remind me that, look, he gave me the greatest gift a mama could ever get: another son. I was not forgotten.

Except all those months came after his birth, and, with them, hit after hit after hit, and I could barely lift my head from the floor, because this didn’t feel like love.

THIS DOESN’T FEEL LIKE LOVE.

I feel abandoned. I feel forgotten. I feel wrong, like maybe we were selfish to have so many children or pursue our dreams or try to build our own businesses or use our gifts or make a way where there was no way.

I certainly don’t feel brave, the kind of brave needed for something like this. I feel like a little eleven-year-old girl who’s wondering if her daddy is going to come through for her.

And he never did.

///

We did not plan for everything.

Some would say we made our bed and now must figure out how to fit in it. And maybe it’s true. We chose to have six children, even though we could not have seen what might happen two days after our sixth was born. We chose to turn down that job offer my husband got a year ago because we thought we needed to stay at our church and heal a little. We chose to believe that God would take care of our needs instead of planning how to afford six kids on paper.

Now I can’t help it. I feel cornered and trapped—and that makes me fighting-angry.

On my best days I shape thousands and thousands of words into essays and songs and poems and stories. On my worst days I sit around thinking maybe we shouldn’t have had so many children.

Which one would I have given back? That answer’s easy at least. Not one of them.

All my life I’ve heard these stories of other people falling on hard times and then—miracle of all miracles—that giant check comes just in time at the end of the month, and there you go.

There you go. All neat and pretty. They’re blessed people. And if they’re blessed people, then that makes us…not blessed people—because on the last day of last month, we transferred half the remainder of our savings into our checking account to pay for our most basic needs, make sure our kids had food to eat, keep a roof over our heads for another month.

“It’s so hard to understand,” I told my mom the next day. “After so many years of giving ourselves to God’s mission and ministry.”

Makes a person not ever want to do mission and ministry again. That’s the part I didn’t say out loud.

///

“God will provide,” they say. “God will make a way where there is no way,” they say. “Don’t worry about tomorrow,” they say. “God will meet your needs.”

What about when he didn’t? When he still doesn’t?

Does that make him any less sovereign? Any less great? Any less merciful or loving or kind?

My head wants to say yes. Yes, it makes him less sovereign, great, merciful, loving, kind. Yes, it makes him cruel and uncaring and just like the earthly father who let go.

But my heart knows the answer.

No. God is the same today as he was yesterday. He does not change because of my circumstances or my feelings or even my knowledge or lack of it.

So what does all this mean?

Well, I wish I had a neat and pretty answer for you. But I don’t, because our story isn’t over. We are still navigating through this mess, and we don’t know how it’s going to end. Not yet.

All I know for sure today is that love sometimes does what’s better instead of what’s easier. My kids remind me of that every day.

I guess I know something else, too. One day the anger will fade. One day I will know how this ends. One day I will be on the other side.

Just not today. Today is for walking, one step in front of the other, trying not to trip.

Pressed but not crushed. Persecuted, not abandoned. Struck down, but not destroyed.

Never that.

This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.