I remember being a kid in elementary school – probably age 9 – experiencing anxiety each day going to school. I would think through all these worst case scenarios the whole bus ride. It was an hour-long bus ride. We lived in Japan at the time, and the post we lived on was an hour away from the post with a school. So I had a lot of time to torment myself with these thoughts.

What if there were a fire while I was gone? An earthquake? What if I left the house, and when I came back my whole family were gone? I would play these horrific scenes in my mind and get all worked up.

Once I got to school, I’d feel okay and wouldn’t have time to dwell on the possible tragedies. But on that bus again in the afternoon… I’d have anxiety all over again. An anxiousness over what I would find when I got there. Would my worst fears come true? I just wanted to be home. The anticipation and fear of these tragedies were probably enough that I needed counseling back then, but this was the 90s, and we lived in a foreign country, and we were an Army family, so it just wasn’t something we did. I never got the counseling I could have benefited from, so I came up with my own less-than-stellar coping mechanisms.

I don’t know if I thought that somehow if I were present when these what-if scenarios took place, I’d be able to save them? Minimize the damage? Or maybe it was that I was just afraid I’d come home to everyone gone, and I’d be alone… and then what?

Whatever the causes of the anxiety, I think at least one of them was a fear of not being safe. Of being alone, exposed. Abandoned. Nowhere to go. No one to care for me. I think that might have been a big thing. And probably most of it stemmed from my father being a narcissistic abuser. Not that I knew it at the time, because none of this was a conscious realization, but there was always something off. Always something not right. Always a feeling of unsafe and walking on eggshells. I tiptoed through my life, careful to not set off any traps.

So many years of my life later, when I was a young married mom of 1, then 2, and then 3 small children, all under the age of 7, I was still seeking a safe place. A place I felt I belonged.

Not that I didn’t belong with my husband and kids. I did. But when you survive an abusive upbringing, just because you get out of the house, doesn’t mean you don’t bring your baggage with you.

And I had a lot of baggage.

So my goal was to create a safe place in my own home that I didn’t have growing up.

We started off with a very small house. Around 1200 square feet. We called it a starter home, and we had hoped to sell it and upgrade years before we finally had the means to do so. We lived off one income because we had decided I’d stay home with the kids. That lent itself to homeschooling and continuing to stay home with the kids, rather than going into the workforce. We learned a lot about living small and living contentedly in that little house. We lived there for just over eight years.

We were finally able to sell, make some money off the sale to put toward our farmhouse, and move across town. We brought the chickens, bought the goats, and eventually added the rabbits. We thought it was the most idyllic, heavenly home and farm we could have ever imagined. And it was.

For about five minutes.

Within the first month of purchasing the house, we ran into rotten subfloor upstairs where a window had leaked at one time. We discovered this while having new flooring installed upstairs.

We moved on from that, and we thought things were good. Until the basement started taking on water. We spent nearly two years fighting with our home owners’ insurance to send someone to look at the house so we could get things fixed, and we were always told the water in the basement was ground water. The agent tried to sell us flood insurance.

So for that whole time, we were working to seal the basement. We bought better sump pumps, called contractors, puttied the walls with hydraulic cement, and went downstairs often to suck the water off the floor with a ShopVac. Nothing that we did helped. We all but abandoned storing anything in the basement, and I never went down there because it just gave me too much anxiety.

In the midst of all this, our fence energizer got struck by lightning and sent the electric current back up to the house, which took out several electric outlets; goats got sick and died; our 14-year-old Aussie shepherd had to be put down; and it seemed to be a never-ending cycle of hard things. But there was still good, too. There has always been good in the midst of all this.

Fast forward to March of 2023, and this has been the hardest year for us. And it’s only August.

The March 3 storms hit our house and damaged both the roof on our home and on our workshop. Within that same weekend, as hubby was preparing to leave for a 3-week training overseas with his Guard unit, we also finally discovered the source of the water in our basement.

It was never ground water. It had always been a broken sewer pipe in the ground under our back patio. That the sellers covered up with spray foam in the concrete block of the basement wall, so we wouldn’t see the water when we first saw the house or when we did our final walk-through.

That led to another insurance claim. The insurance paid for the plumbing work and to get the pipe replaced, but we are still waiting to hear what will be reimbursed (if anything) for the resulting damage to the eroded and displaced earth under the patio and up against the house.

We also had a new in-ground sump pump system installed three feet into the basement floor to prevent any future water coming in. With the earth up against the house and under the back patio eroded and displaced, the potential for ground water to come into the basement is not unsubstantial, so we have been trying to do our best and our due diligence to maintain our home. Things that should have been done by the sellers/original owners, but I am not responsible for their unscrupulous acts; only the resulting fallout from their depravity, it would seem.

Life is so often so very unfair.

Because of the damage to the pipe, patio, foundation, etc… the insurance sent a structural engineer out to the house to assess everything. While he was here, he found evidence of old termite damage, and that led us down another path of horrifying discovery. Which was also deceptively disguised by the sellers of the house. We are still in the middle of that fix.

We had a new structural beam installed in the basement with new steel supports to hold it all up. So at least the foundation is now secure. And we aren’t sinking into the abyss, like I thought since January 2021.

After looking through our termite letter from when we bought the house, it appears that we were deceived by not only the sellers, but also the termite company. The termite company that mitigated the termites 30-some years ago is the same termite company that did the termite inspection in 2020, and that company put in writing that there was no current termite infestation, nor had there ever been a termite infestation. We tried to get a copy of the original treatment plan for the house, and we were told it was on file with them, but that we were not allowed to have it because we weren’t the owners back then. So frustrating.

So, for now, the only thing we can do is pay for the resulting damage to be fixed. We just got the dining room wall of our house fixed with new studs and plates. Now it just has to be finished with insulation, Sheetrock, and paint. But it’s stable. Fortunately, these are not load-bearing walls of the house, or else we’d have had a lot more trouble on our hands.

About a week before the construction company was scheduled to fix the dining room wall, I found more evidence of old termite damage in the adjoining wall in the living room. The construction company came out to open up the living room wall and confirmed my suspicions. More damage.

The main construction worker said he suspects that the living room window was the original entry point of the termites because the window had been (and continues to be) leaking water. He said he believes the window above it also continues to leak water, which explains why there was rotten subfloor under that window when we replaced the flooring upstairs in 2021. All of this water is “water falling” down the wall, between the outside brick and the framework of the house. This is water that we’d never actually see coming inside the house, buckling floors and causing mold. But it was the perfect way to keep termites happy and fed for as long as they lived in the walls of the house back in the early 1990s.

So we have two new windows ordered, and when they come in, the construction crew will come back to install them, and they’ll also fix the studs and plates in the living room wall.

This has been a long journey. And I will admit it’s gotten my anxiety up all over again. I look at every wall in my house with concern, broaching on fear, knocking on anxiety, sometimes giving way to full-blown panic.

Remember the episode of “Friends” where Monica searches the guys’ apartment for the outlet that connects to the switch on the wall?

Yeah. That’s me these days.

I want to rip out every wall of the house in search of old damage because I don’t trust what I’m looking at anymore. I trusted so much before when we bought this house, but the deception of the sellers has got me wondering, “If they lied about and covered this up, what else did they lie about and cover?… What about this wall? What about this one?… And what’s that in the ceiling? Oh, that’s just a stray paint mark… Okay… But what about that!?” And so on, and so forth.

I asked my construction guy if I should start ripping out every wall of my house. He said, “No, please don’t do that.” He doesn’t think it’s necessary. Only if we were to find definitive evidence that required us to do so, and he hasn’t seen anything else in the house that would indicate to him that we need to.

I’ve had a foundation specialist, construction workers and experts, plumbers, a structural engineer, and two different pest control/termite companies walk through my house, inspecting walls, ceilings, beams, plates, windows, pipes, and every square inch of space I can think of, top to bottom, and they all have told me the same thing. Don’t do it. Don’t open walls. Don’t start ripping things apart.

But I want to.

Logic has left the building, and my fear wants to control me. I want to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my house is safe, that it’s a refuge, that it’s solid. That we can dwell here and everything will be all right.

I so crave a safe place.

Don’t we all want to have a place to run to for comfort, refuge, and shelter at the end of a hard day, a hard week, a hard season, a hard year?

When we walk a long road of pain, suffering, illness, loss, and grief, we all long for something that will ease these feelings.

And when your home, the place you’ve purchased for your family, the place you’ve toiled for for so long to make stable and secure literally has damaged and broken elements to it, causing your faith in the structural stability and security itself to quake… to where do you go?

It’s the only home we have on this earth. And when my faith in the beams, joists, and walls of my home are in question, I often question where God is.

“Where are You in all of this? Don’t You see?”
And I want to ask, “Why, God?”

It certainly makes me rethink ever buying an old house again. I want to raze the entire thing to the ground and start new. I know I’ve said at least a handful of times that I want to abandon the house entirely and live in a yurt. Yes, it would be hot in Alabama in August, but at least it wouldn’t have old termite tunnels.

I went to a children’s choir planning meeting this past Sunday. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was low. Very down. I didn’t sing the songs that morning in church. I, a singer, worship leader, children’s choir teacher, musical person, who loves to sing… didn’t want to sing. I just didn’t have it in me.

The music was beautiful and worshipful, but I didn’t join in. I know that when we’re down, music can be such a balm to the soul, but I was lower than even being able to sing at that point. I could feel myself beginning to sink into a depression, but part of that is trying to hide it because you know you’re not supposed to be, and shouldn’t be, depressed. So I put on a smile and trudged through the day anyway.

So I went to the meeting anyway, and all it took was one person to ask me how I was doing, and the dam broke.

I certainly didn’t want to hear or take in the encouragement I was being offered. I wanted it to go in one ear and out the other. I wanted to wallow in my pit of despair and invite others to join me in the misery. “Please, come sit in the pit with me and tell me all the things I want to hear.” She didn’t.

Instead, she spoke truth. Truth I needed. Truth that ended up being exactly the right thing to say. Truth that became a balm to my weary heart, soul, and mind.

It wasn’t easy to hear. My mind did not want to ingest it. It was sour and bitter, and I wanted to reject it and stay in the mud.

But it would have been wrong of me to stay in that place. Not that feeling low, depressed, or sad is wrong. But I had taken it one step further, to the point where I was wading into the depths of despair. Of forgetting my joy, my hope, and the source of my strength. Of abandoning my faith in God to see me through this hard place.

My pastor’s message on Sunday was entirely on topic for how I was feeling. I had to chuckle to myself when I saw the title of the sermon come up on the screen. God sees. He knows. He isn’t unaware of what has been going on in my life and my house.

And this whole time I’ve been asking, “Why?”
I mean, “Seriously, why, though!?”

And I think it’s this: this house in which I live is not my home. I mean, it is; we pay the mortgage (and the second mortgage we took out to pay for all the damage that had to be fixed), but this house in Toney, Alabama is temporal. It will not stand forever; though I do hope it stands at least for as long as we live in it. It has so far, and it has been since 1977.

But it’s not my eternal dwelling place.

Everything that we have is temporary. None of it will last forever. It’s passing away. The house, the farm, the land, the animals, the people we love. It will all fade away.

So what remains?

If all of this is someday going to wither like the grass and fade like the flowers, then to where do we run? Where is my refuge? Where is my dwelling place if it’s not this farmhouse?

I think you know where I’m going with this.

It’s not my house, or this land, or anything on it.

It’s Jesus.

The Rock of my salvation.
My Refuge and Strong Tower.
My Shelter.
My Dwelling Place.

The Psalmist had a lot to say about where we should dwell:

“For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand [anywhere else]; I would rather stand [as a doorkeeper] at the threshold of the house of my God Than to live [at ease] in the tents of wickedness.”
Psalm 84:10 AMP

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭90‬:‭1‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place— the Most High, who is my refuge— no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭91‬:‭1‬-‭2‬, ‭4‬, ‭9‬-‭10‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭46‬:‭1‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭34‬:‭8‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“But I will sing of your strength; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭59‬:‭16‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭27‬:‭4‬ ‭ESV‬‬

““See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches and sought refuge in his own destruction!””
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭52‬:‭7‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily! Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me!”
‭‭Psalm‬ ‭31‬:‭2‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Even Jesus spoke of how we should build a house and where our focus should be:

““Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.””
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭7‬:‭24‬-‭27‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.””
‭‭John‬ ‭18‬:‭36‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.””
‭‭John‬ ‭8‬:‭31‬-‭32‬ ‭ESV‬‬

And later in the New Testament, apostles spoke of our true home and how we are to live while in this temporary place:

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭12‬:‭2‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
‭‭Hebrews‬ ‭12‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭ESV‬‬

This world is not my home; I’m just passing through.

And though I do believe we must use the resources God has provided to make our earthly home structurally sound and safe for us while we’re living here, I have to keep it all in perspective. Due diligence and structural soundness are important and must be accomplished. This is not a call to neglect the resources we have and to become poor stewards of our blessings. Quite the contrary. We must be good stewards of what God has entrusted to us. It’s about where I’m storing my treasure, where my heart is, and where my eyes are gazing.

Where have I fixed my eyes? Is it on the storm around me, or is it on Jesus? If it’s the storm, and the worries about the house, I will sink. If I place my hope and treasure in the walls of my home, I will sink.

““Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6‬:‭19‬-‭21‬ ‭ESV‬‬

If my safe place, my refuge, my hiding place, my dwelling space is anything or anyone but God, I am going to be disappointed, fraught with uncertainty, filled with angst, and wracked with anxiety.

Jesus said these things:

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
‭‭John‬ ‭14‬:‭27‬ ‭ESV‬‬

“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.””
‭‭John‬ ‭16‬:‭33‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Jesus promised that we’d have trouble, problems, and trials. But we are also called to take heart, persevere, hold on, and keep the faith.

We mustn’t give up and grow weary while well-doing. We are called to press on, consider carefully how we walk, keep guard, speak truth, love each other, encourage one another, restore each other to faith, remind, and spur others to continue. Even when we don’t want to keep going ourselves.

We need each other. We need reminders. We need friends who will speak truth to us when we’re down. Who will get into the mud with us, not to wallow alongside us forever (becoming miserable themselves), but to pull us out and get us back on our feet.

This world is not my home. This house in Toney, Alabama is not my forever home. My eyes need to be looking up and toward the One who saves. The Author and Perfecter of my faith.

My house will be fine, or it won’t. Maybe it will stand another fifty years, or a tornado could come rip it from its foundation tomorrow. I have these two hands, Jesus with me, resources and blessings He has provided, and today. What can I do today?

I have a choice. We all have a choice. I can choose to fix my eyes on the One who gives me life and sustains me, or I can look at the walls and be filled with worry.

I can’t promise that I won’t be gripped with fear and worry again tomorrow, because I very well could be, but right now, I choose joy and faith in the One who walks with me through all the ups and downs. He didn’t promise life would be easy, but He did promise to be with me always, even to the end of the age.

And I’m thankful for the friends He has gifted me, who walk beside me and encourage me. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

I don’t know what I’d do without Him.

So, today I choose to dwell in the presence of the Most High, because better is one day is His courts than thousands elsewhere.

“In this world we will struggle
But You have overcome the world
In this life we will stumble
But our future is secure

There is hope in suffering
There is life behind what we see

All of this will disappear
We are strangers here
We are strangers here
We will see You face to face
And all will fade away
Yes, all will fade away

Our moments are fleeting
Every breath could be our last
And these things that we’re holding
Will only wither like the grass

There’s no end of time with You
No treasure here compares to You

All of this will disappear
We are strangers here
We are strangers here
We will see You face to face
And all will fade away
Yes, all will fade away

Caught up, caught up with You, my Jesus
Caught up, caught up with You forever, Lord
In love, in love with You, my Jesus
In love, in love with You forever

Caught up with You, Jesus
With You forever, my Lord
In love, in love with You, Jesus
In love, so in love with You forever”

• Meredith Andrews, “All Will Fade Away”