Depression

After she recovered from the flu, Laura and I had another employment battle. It was time for her to find another job. She had had enough of the daycare world and she wanted to find something else. Once again, she wasn’t attacking the job-finding task as I would have liked. She was just praying and waiting for the right opportunity – GRRRRR!!!! But she loves to strip wallpaper and paint. So, while she was waiting, she decided to go help Susan Gimotti with her new house.   

Mike Gimotti was working as a salesman/account executive for a company called the Apartment Guide and one of the other ladies in the Care Group was his boss. She was pregnant and needed to hire someone to help her to service her accounts. Laura’s job-seeking method had worked again.

As the Gimottis settled into their new home, they were asked to start a new Small Group for couples without kids. We were one of the three other couples to join them, along with the Dalmases and the Jordans. Those were fun days. Besides the significant spiritual growth we were enjoying, we were making some deep, long-lasting friendships. As we had no kids, we often stayed up late playing games together and the group grew pretty quickly.

We had been very blessed to have been able to live with the Browns for all this time. The three-month trial period had turned into a year and a half. Their girls had started out shy with us at first but by the end, we all got along well. However, whenever you live with someone, little tensions will always arise here and there. Inevitably, you have different ideas on how to do things. It’s always best to try and work these things out right away. But after a while, it can just get to a place where you feel things pile up to a point of no return. 

In Ecclesiastes 3, there is a passage about there being a time for everything under the sun – a time to be born and a time to die, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones, etc. Well, you can add to the list, a time to live with others and a time to live by yourselves. Laura felt like it was time to have place on our own. Now that we both had jobs, we decided to rent an apartment nearby.

Around this same time, another guy from Southside church (whose friendship would become life-changing for us and with which we would have some uncanny connections) came to work at the Apartment Guide as an account executive. His name was Eric Hughes. His father had been a pastor at Southside, overseeing the music. Soon after Laura got back from Europe, his father had stepped down to start a company (which was to also play a significant role in my life in years to come). Eric was also now part of the music team at church.

Laura’s main goal in life was to be a mom but I felt like I had far too much to do before we got into all that. I wanted to get through school and at least start making films before kids. Laura and I both believed that the best way to raise children was for the mom to stay at home. So once we started having children, my salary needed to be able to support that. I also didn’t feel like I was ready to be a parent yet. I did make one concession. I agreed to talk about talking about having kids.

I had started taking a couple of classes at Regent but didn’t have enough money to go full-time. Bill Brown (the Dean of Communications at Regent with whom we had been living) however, had arranged a full scholarship for former missionaries, even raising the money for the funding. As we were getting more stable now, my goal was to start working part time so I could go to school full-time. Reality often turns out rather different than our plans. 

Within a month of living by ourselves, Laura got pregnant! I guess the talking about talking about it had a potent effect. Yet the night she took the test, I abandoned her, yet again. My friend, Russ Martin, from the video production team in Europe came to do some freelancing in Chesapeake. He was actually working at the production company where I had first tried to do an internship right across the street from our apartment. So that evening, on this momentous occasion, I left her again to go see Russ. After that, I went into depression.

With a baby coming, I thought my dreams were over. How would I accomplish them now? It wasn’t that I was against having a child – just not now. I had just gotten the scholarship but the problem was that with scholarships, you usually have to go to school full-time. I wasn’t going to be able to make enough money to support a family working part-time. Once again, Bill came to the rescue and waived the full-time requirement.

Then there was the question of health insurance. Laura had benefits through her work, so her insurance would cover everything until the baby was born. I also had insurance though Regent for myself. But once Laura quit work, I wouldn’t be able to afford insurance through school for all of us. And being without health insurance is a dangerous proposition in the U.S. where medical costs are extremely high.

One of the lessons for Christians from Reformed theology is that God loves us and He is in control. When trials come, we should be able to rest and trust in God’s sovereignty because anything that He allows into our lives must be for our good. Another lesson is that God cares more about our hearts than our comfort. He uses difficulties to help us seek Him because too often, when we are comfortable, we tend to drift away.

Given human nature, these lessons are very difficult to learn. I don’t think I will ever learn them completely. At that point in my life, I had a long way to go. Many people around the world go through things far worse than I was experiencing but each person’s struggles are singular to themselves and life felt very dark for me. Then it seemed to get worse.

Moving into our apartment