A Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Season (Or so I thought!)

I felt like I was living my dream life. I had met my person, my soul mate. We had moved to a town that I felt called to and we were beginning a dream that we both didn’t realize we had: owning a coffee shop. And pretty much in a year’s time, all my illusions of liking my new life were heaped onto a giant burn pile.

It was hard moving to a new place. I had done it as a child and it had taken years and years and years for me to accept the change. I still to this day daydream about what it would have been like to have not moved. And now I had moved to a place in the world where my husband had lived his whole life. That is what I had wanted as a child. To live in the same house, in the same small town where my family had lived for generations. To walk into the grocery store, the church, the school, the bank and know everyone—that had been what I had longed for since that childhood move because that is what I had known and what I had. And now, I only knew my husband and he had that. I felt very much in his world and I didn’t know how to make it mine.

I can remember lots of people coming into our coffee shop to see him and talk to him. He knew everyone. And no one knew me. And that’s the funny thing when someone has what you think you need or want: you begin to resent them for it—unfairly of course. They remind you of something deep within you that you are missing and it is easier to blame them than to look within and really fix that gaping hole. So, my poor new husband had to deal with that.

And to set the stage again, we were two months into being married and one week into owning our business, when our espresso machine broke at work. There was a power surge in town and it fried all the automation on our machine. It literally charred the motherboard and left it inoperable. We had business insurance so we filed a claim but, alas, the insurance company was not eager to pay. We found a work around and learned how to do everything manually but it was the first thing that went wrong.

Our machine had been fixed for a few months when we encountered another problem. We walked in one morning to find the windows all fogged up and heard a loud pop like explosion. The pressure stat which controls the boiler had failed. We quickly turned if off and tried to figure out the problem. It’s 6am, we are 22 and need to be open to make money. But every time our espresso machine failed, we could only serve drip coffee! Eventually, we found out that the pressure stat was so attached/corroded to the boiler that the technician could not get it off to replace it without a high chance of ruining the boiler. Now, boilers are expensive! The repair was over $6000 back in 2009. But, to refer back to the earlier part in the story, we were 22, had no extra money, and not much credit. So, we waited on the insurance once again. They sent four different investigators out and switched claims persons on us at least twice. While we were waiting on insurance, we found yet another work around because we absolutely needed to make money and to be open. In order to use the machine, we had to open up the top of it and switch off a safety button every few minutes to get by and pull shots. If you touched it in the wrong spot, you would shock yourself! It was 220V and, let me tell you, I made the mistake of touching the wrong part one time and it shocked me so bad that I fell to the ground.

After four months, the insurance decided to pay out $6000 on the claim. But, commercial espresso machines are expensive and that was about half of what we needed. We knew we could not get in more debt so we decided our only option was to let all three of our employees go and work by ourselves to pay for the cost of the machine. Wow, the things you are willing to do if you feel called to them! For the next year of our life, we worked every single shift by ourselves. We would get to the shop at 6am and be open from 6:30am-6:00pm. Most nights we would be done by 7pm and be home by 7:30pm. And most days of our business we made only what would pay our bills. Nothing extra! We were classically newly married and dirt poor. I can remember having our water bill due that day and taking the money we made that day to go and pay it. I will not romanticize or glorify being poor because it is extremely hard but I will say that I have countless stories of making the exact money needed for a bill or having someone give us money when they knew we needed help. To say we were humbled would be putting it lightly.

One night during this time, I can vividly remember checking our bank account and we had five dollars and some change in it. We needed to eat dinner and at the time we had a Little Cesars Pizza in town. That was the most amount of food we could get for the money (we thought) so we went down to buy a pizza with our last five dollars. When we got there, we went to order and the employee said they were about to close and they had extra pizzas if we wanted them for free! I will never forget that moment. I felt so humbled by God’s provision in that moment. We had nothing, but I remember so vividly feeling for one of the first times in my life that He knows how to take care of me. It was a lesson that I was to learn daily during that season.

Things were not going as planned and we had just started. It was definitely a sign of things to come. We eventually got our brand new machine and slowly worked to pay it off. We met every single customer because we were there all the time. And we started to learn first hand the things that make a business run: payroll, pricing, customer service, taxes, licenses, vendors, paying bills, and interpersonal relations.

About this time, I started to get very confused. When enough things go wrong in your life, you start questioning your path, your purpose, your ability to make good decisions, etc. I was in that phase of questioning. I really believed we were supposed to do this business. The timing, the process, the ability to buy it had all lined up so magically. It seemed to fit us so well and we had dreamed of working together. But, nothing seemed to be going well externally. My core belief at that time was that if you were meant to do something and had a calling to it, it would all work out smoothly. My belief system at that time did not include challenges and hard times— if I was truly doing what God had called me to. This was the beginning of a long learning season for me where those notions would be put into the fire.

As I’ve come to learn later, things had to be shifted externally to begin to shape me internally. I was in a growth season where my values, my own understanding of myself and the world and God needed to be brought to light so they could begin to change. The pain on the outside was mirrored by inner pain. Seasons like that tend to take you to a depth of yourself you never knew. Or they end up revealing things about yourself that need to change.