Motherhood is one of the hardest jobs to do; having a life depend on your every waking move is scarier than can be expressed. My insecurities in the beginning years of my journey were sometimes the most debilitating experience ever. How I got through is a miracle in it of itself. I was a dysfunctional functioning mother to say the least. The following entry is a flashback of my early years of motherhood. Can you relate to me?

My dear friends, fear and anxiety, came along side me after I tucked Joey into bed and started looking into our empty fridge. We had breakfast for him but barely anything for lunch and nothing for dinner. By the time I was entering into my second year of motherhood, fear and I were well acquainted with each other. Fear told me the truth and prepared me for my failures instead of that nonsense of believing in God. It was a great concept for other people but with the kind of demons I was fighting, fear was what I needed to keep me from getting too comfortable. Comfort meant vulnerability which leads to unexpected defeat. Not me…I knew better. Every day was a battle and looking at my demons, I knew who was going to win before even taking my first swing. I mean in two years of motherhood; Sam and I were one dollar away from being completely homeless.

How in the world did we get here? During this time, Sam was a youth pastor at his home church for about two years; having faith in God was what he and I taught our teenagers. After finally getting a grip of this mothering thing, we discovered that we were a part of a huge real-estate scam. Our home, as well as several other houses, were not sold legally and at the young age of 24 we were smack in the center of losing everything. I will never forget walking into the doors of the church to teach Wednesday night Teen Bible Study; hours after we found out that our house was no longer ours. Our home was foreclosed, and we were forced to leave after much investigations by the district attorney’s office.

Even though we left the house, we were saddled with so many expenses that our car was repossessed right in front of Sam’s job…at the church. What was more embarrassing was they tried to repo someone else’s car by accident. Our financial issues were exposed for all to see. I had failed and continued to fail while others watched it all happen.

Hard times was not a first for my family. My mother’s mom faced poverty at its worst. In Jamaica my grandmother did not have enough food for herself, my mother and her siblings. Sadly, my grandmother died due to health issues from lack of nutrition; leaving behind four extremely young children. She did without so that my mother and her siblings could have, and it costed her, her life. It was devastating for my mother to lose her mom when she was only three years old, but it was even harder for my mother to lose her baby brother—who was only one year old when he passed. Poverty held its grip.

My mother defied the odds in so many ways as a child, but she started seeing the patterns of poverty when my older brother was born. My mother and father struggled a lot to make ends meet. This hold was tighter than my mother expected, and she found herself facing the same challenges. Around the time my older brother was one or two my mother looked in her fridge and there was no food anywhere. My older brother was so hungry but sadly, all she could do was give him warm water in his bottle that night. His intense hunger pains and frustration caused him to cry himself to sleep. Those moments will never leave my mother’s memory and she promised herself that that would never happen again. She was going to fight this no matter what it cost, so she made the leap to leave our small island of Jamaica and come to the country where dreams were made…America.

After all the sacrifices that she made to get me in a better place than her, here I was. Now it’s my turn to break the cycle and with tears in my eyes I am slapped with the reality that I am no different than the women before me. Oh, did I forget to tell you, I was pregnant…again. Nothing in me was happy for the news of the new life growing in me. My job was to pretend that I never peed on that stupid stick. Fear crept up on me and grabbed my face and whispered the truth…my dysfunctional truth. “Marsha, God is never going to get you out of this. You will never be able to take care of Joey and now a new baby; you are screwed now. You lost your house, lost your car and just a few weeks ago you were begging the electricity company to stay on in the middle of December. Is this the life that you wanted for Joey and now another new life is going to depend on you?” I slammed the kitchen fridge door shut and started feeling the tears well up in my eyes more and more.

“Sam we have nothing for Joey to eat.” We went back and forth on what we could do and then Sam said, “Listen we are going to trust God. We’ll have food for breakfast and see what God is going to do. He’s never failed us.” Ha…that’s what we are supposed to say, I thought I was done…in so many ways. Joey still slept in our room but in his own bed. I laid in bed and looked at him sleep. He was my everything. I was his world and he was mine. I could never think of him in need of anything and not being able to give it to him. Despite all the hard moments we had, he loved his home and has never ever asked for anything more.

Tears continued to run down the bridge of my nose as I felt trapped. I was trapped between holding on to the promises God spoke over me—that seemed like a joke—and the destructive future that seemed more realistic than my breath in the coldest winter. God told me he was going to bless me in the city, in the field, my comings and my goings, the fruit of my womb and my barn store house.

Most of all he had called Sam and I to be society breakers. What did that even mean? Almost four years in of marriage and we were doing life as society predicted, horrible. We were in smack dab in the heart of the inner cities—the Bronx was our home, but few lived differently than we did. Depending on where you went, there was feces on the kiddie swings, broken bottles on the floor and foul language written on the slides. Hearing the reports of shootings, gang violence and other criminal activity was never a shock. Homelessness and poverty were never really that far from anyone. Few people marry and expect failure; most sane people marry for a better life and we were just struggling together. When was I going to return back to being childlike and believing the stories in the Bible?

Fear tucked me in that Saturday night, but it was hope that nudged me awake that Sunday morning. It could be morning sickness, but even though there was the same amount of food in the fridge, I felt an excitement that God was with me and things were going to be okay. I got ready for church with Joey and Sam. I worshipped God with tears in my eyes and desperation on my lips. There were a few Sundays that I made my way to the altar to cry my dysfunction away but there was so much dysfunction that I always found out I had more left. That day though I stayed in my seat and let the tears roll down my eyes as I let my imagination run wild.

After the worship portion of service was over, we were surprised when one of the council members of our church called all the pastors and their wives to come up to the pulpit. We all stood in front of the congregation as the council member spoke kind words about all 5 pastors and their wives. It was pastor’s appreciation day. After the kind words, we were handed a check. Sam and I were floored when we opened the envelop and it was $1500. That check was exactly what we needed but who can cash a check on a Sunday morning? God instructed Sam to go to a McDonald’s where he knew someone, and it is there that God provided for us that night.

That night as the three of us ate our plain cheeseburgers, God spoke to me and said, “I will never leave you or forsake you. You must trust me. Breaking the chains that have gripped your family for so long will not happen overnight, but it will happen. Believe me over fear and trust me.” I want to say that fear had no hold on me from that day forward, but I would be lying. Fear lost this round but would wait for a more opportune time.

Wow, if I could only sit with myself, I would have reassured her that God is not a man that he would lie. However, I don’t think I could have explained where God was going to take our family. If I thought I would have listened I would tell myself that God has a life for me that would blow my mind. Poverty, fear and anxiety is not your destiny, nor are they my friends. They are just distractions that are trying to detour you from the blessings that is destined for you. The blessings that God has in store for you exceeds ten generations, just push through!