A Guest Story By Christina Friley
My husband and I had a whirlwind courting experience. We were married within six months of our first date! While engaged and shortly after getting married, we both agreed we would wait to have children until my husband had graduated from engineering school. I was currently working full time to support our family and didn’t want the added pressure of raising a child and being the breadwinner for our home.
I didn’t mind at the time, I had lucked into my dream job right out of college and knew we could have children in a few years. However, only a year into our marriage and attending a family congregation surrounded by young children and babies, I often found myself leaving church in tears. We knew the prophets had counseled us not to let matters of finances keep us from starting a family, but we felt strongly we were supposed to wait. We chose to wait until my husband at least had a job offer secured post-graduation before we would consider beginning our family.
That’s when the first major spiritual prompting came. It led us to consider having children months earlier than anticipated. We figured it would probably take us a few months to get pregnant, as it had taken many of our friends around us. Not so! Within a month of making the decision to start our family, I was pregnant. And my husband? Still in school, still no job.
I started to freak out. What if my husband couldn’t find a job before the baby showed up? Could we afford to care for this incoming blessing? We knew how lucky we were to have conceived so quickly, but the timing of this baby was not in line with what we hand planned. The Lord knew the troubles of our hearts. Within a month and a half, my husband was offered a part time position (to accompany his full-time school hours) at a local company. It would become full time position the Monday following his graduation from school.
My husband was thrilled! The job was everything he hoped it would be. He would be the only engineer of his specialty at the company, allowing him great opportunities to develop skills quickly and greater chances for career advancement earlier in his career than he anticipated. I started to worry a little less, too.
Within six months of him starting his job, our precious daughter was born. I left my job shortly after, a decision I wrestled with for months. I knew I wanted to be a mother, but suddenly I realized how my decision to stay home would cut our household income in half. This was the income that had supported our family from the beginning of our marriage. Could we afford for me to leave this job?
My husband supported my decision from the get-go, reassuring me that the Lord had blessed us before, and he would bless again. Somehow, things would all work out. I treasured the first few months of being home with my daughter. Getting to be there for all of her firsts was a blessing I knew many of my friends were not able to enjoy when they headed back to work.
My husband loved his job, and I loved being home. It worked for us. Then my husband’s student loan payments started being pulled from our bank account. When my daughter was only four months old, our sewer line in our old home began to give in and we had to replace the entire line. The fix wasn’t cheap, but we didn’t have a choice. We agreed to another financial commitment. The guilt of leaving my job started to set back in. Had I made the wrong choice? If I had chosen to stay at work, the financial burdens that began to pile up wouldn’t feel so heavy.
Just over a year after my husband had started his job, I started to have some pretty strong promptings again. This time it was that my husband was supposed to search for another job. My husband, always the more levelheaded and logical between the two of us, reminded me that it didn’t make sense. He had been in his job for such a short amount of time. Where could he go that could provide him so much opportunity to learn on the job? Still, I persisted even though I wasn’t entirely sure why. I just knew that I felt strongly we were supposed to search. My husband pushed back for weeks on the matter, but finally agreed that if I felt so strongly about this he would look around and see if there was anything available.
A position had just opened up at another local company, one my husband had worked with previously in other capacities and had a lot of respect for. He put in an application, and within a week he completed both a first and second interview. The new job would provide for our family in all the ways the previous job could not. Long term, the job would provide better benefits. That was a must for our family if we wanted to have any more children; our deductible at the time was astronomically high. He would have greater opportunities for growth within the company, and we could feel more comfortable about the financial commitments we had to take on in the past year.
It was truly a miracle to not only have found the job when we did, but for my husband to have so quickly won over the interviewers. We took the leap of faith, and left the job that had provided us security for the one that could provide us opportunities for growth. With our world in a state of uncertainty, I have felt the blessings of the decision to act on that prompting even more so. While many businesses have closed and been forced to furlough employees, my husband’s new employer remained an essential business. With our second child on the way, I have felt a sense of calm that things were set into motion months before I even realized for this exact moment of peace that I felt.
I know that our Heavenly Father works similarly, challenging us to trust Him and leave places of security for areas of growth. He has reassured me in times of uncertainty that my blessings were coming, not on my timeline but His. When I wasn’t sure how things would work out? He knew, and He comforted me during periods of my life where I lacked clarity about how my life was supposed to go. As I strove to hear the voice of my Savior in my life, paths I would have never had known about or considered taking became the obvious choice, and blessings I wouldn’t haven’t anticipated were provided to me abundantly.
