We confess to you, Lord.

I have never been a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I refuse/d to call it “Obama”care. That name was/is ridiculous and ignorant. I always felt that it put a burden on that middle swatch of people who made just enough to find themselves in a world of hurt should a catastrophe happen.

While I do see the good that the ACA created, it was never enough and was barely adequate for a good number of people, especially those who lived in the 30+ states that did not expand Medicaid coverage to the people in between the haves and the have-nots.

But this isn’t about our messed-up healthcare system. It’s about a story and I don’t know how to tell a story without giving a personal example. So, here is mine.

This year, we were blessed to have a more than decent income. We always seem live from one paycheck to the next; nonetheless, we have luxuries, we have far more than enough.

We did our taxes this weekend past. Already, we knew we would have to pay some. Debbie has two sources of income in which, and one has no taxes taken out. However, we made a mistake in our guess.

One mistake was in trusting a “broker” to take care of our insurance needs with the ACA/Marketplace. We estimated our 2016 income because we knew that one of the two jobs I had was going away in March. We ended up making more than we estimated; therefore, it was determined that we owed the credit given to us – an approximate $8000.

Now. Imagine.

That is enough to devastate a family. Seriously. I have never in my life had to pay the IRS any more than the simply deductions from each paycheck. In fact, I have always received at least of modicum of money as a return. To pay anything seems ridiculous to me. But to pay closer to $10000 seems absolutely criminal.

I won’t even go into how crazy unfair it is for a working person to have to pay such taxes while a lying, cheating, crotch-grabbing pervert sits behind the desk in the Oval Office and vacations in Florida every weekend. But this is not about that scum.

It is about the sorry state of our minds for allowing such travesty.

This news is enough to devastate an average family. Because an average family does not necessarily have stocks/bonds sitting out there because their grandparents happened to save their money. An average family may have a little saved back for small emergencies but emergencies usually are not small. I know people who are thousands of dollars in debt due to illnesses and extended health care needs. I know people who worked hard all their lives just to lose it all because he or she had an illness. I work with people every day who must make the choice between feeding their families or paying rent. This is the type of emergency that could cause some people to lose their homes. Or end up with huge fines, punishable by prison.

I am not a part of an average family.

I was one of those who had a grandparent who frugally saved money, made some great financial saving choices, handed down those savings to her three children. One of those children was my father. He died on March 25, 2015. He, in his turn, left his part of the inheritance to my sister and me.

I am so thankful that I did not go through the money. I could have. I have done just that before. But this time, I did not. I left it in stocks and bonds. In these past months that the current president has been in office, I could have made a “huuuge” amount of money. However, when I took over my part of the inheritance, I told the broker to put it into “clean” stocks and bonds. There was a long list of funds that we did not buy into because of their corporate greed. As a result, any gains over the past two years have been modest. The point it, the money is there.

So, being thankful for that gift from my daddy/grandmother/grandfather, we began to crawl out of our fear and anxiety. We had a way out. So many do not.

This was our attitude as we entered church on Sunday morning.

Then, it being Lent, the celebrant led us in the Litany of Penitence. If you want to read the whole of it, go to the Book of Common Prayer, page 267 or here: http://www.bcponline.org/SpecialDays/ashwed.html.

This part got our attention:

We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work,
We confess to you, Lord.

All the readings only enhanced this sense of Too Much. The people quarreling with Moses because they wanted water…they forgot why they were doing what they were doing. They forgot that God had led them thus far and that God alone would get them where they were supposed to be. They focused their anger on Moses because he was there.

Paul told the Romans that they needed to remember that hope in Jesus Christ is the only thing we should remember. And, of course, Jesus, according to John, how often are we seeking the wrong source of water and food? We set our thoughts and our deeds on seeking the wrong water and bread.

When Debbie and I headed out in the summer of 2007 to go on the road, we purposely left behind many things. Fear of the unknown was the number one thing. Many material possessions another. Family, friends, community – all left behind because we were following what we believed to be God’s call to us to go out and share our story, to listen to the stories of others, to share the good news that regardless, we are loved by God, steadfastedly, forever.

When we finally settled ourselves in St. Louis, we knew that we were here for a reason. This was/is the place that God called us to be, to do, to share. And so, it has been.

However, somewhere along the way, we forgot that material things are not important. We became comfortable with more than enough. We began to live to the edge again, incurring more debt than savings.

And here is where we are. Brought up short from the midst of our comfort. Rug pulled right out from under us, because of us. Here we are.

It is time to reboot our hearts. We will reset our sights. We will right the wrongs. We will set down our anger, anxiety, and frustration and focus on getting rid of the debt and not incurring any new. We have more than enough. We will live within that. We will focus on need rather than want.

And then we will hang on. Because one thing we have learned – when we listen to the Holy Spirit, she gets all excited. She loves our attention. And this makes me happy.

Here we are, God. We are yours. We will probably forget again. Our prayer is two-fold: that we won’t forget and that if we do, we remember quickly – to God be the Glory in all things. What we have is not ours. It all is for God, because of God, to be used for God’s purpose.

40 days and 40 nights

I owe a large amount of money to a financial institution in Texas who holds all my student loans. These have been in various stages over the past 9 years… deferment, forbearance, and now IBR (income based repayment). I have repaid a meager amount considering.

Recently, I was able to once again put the loans into the IBR mode. All I had to do was to fill out the request form and send that plus my most recent tax return and the low payment would be in place.

The other night, in the middle of the night, I woke up in a state of panic. I remembered seeing an email letting me know that I had a message awaiting me in my EdFinancial inbox. To my dismay, I suddenly had the thought that I didn’t send in the forms! They wouldn’t offer me the repayment option again! The payment was due on March 1! It was a full blown panic attack. The rest of the night was shot as far as sleep was concerned.

The next morning early, I began looking for the paperwork so that I could hurriedly get it in. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Finally, I looked upstairs and found the folder…but the forms I needed were missing.

Suddenly, I remembered…I had mailed in the forms the day after these were requested. The panic slowly receded from my body. Everything was ok.

The point of the retelling of the crazy scene is this:

There is so much drama in my life. Between trying to act as a source of encouragement to several people in my house who have different sources of anxiety plus trying to make certain that all things that need to be done by these people actually get done, there never seems to be enough time for me to do the things I need to do…for ME.

Obviously, that problem is causing me some of my own anxiety…and as I have already noted, I am a fairly anxious person all by myself.

So, in these 40 days and 40 nights, I am exploring that anxiety…which often shows its ugly head as anger. In that I process best when writing, I am not only exploring but trying to find new ways to alleviate the anxiety so that it turns into something positive rather than negative. Right now, I feel very negative.

I don’t know how long this will work, but for the moment, I am focusing on the inward aspects of self with a hope that it will clear a path to better see beyond. For now…we will see where it leads.