Praying Their Way Through Turbulent Times

By Roxann Crane, Acworth, Georgia

As appeared in

Mail thunked into the mailbox and I ran to get it. Ads, bills and...my stomach knotted. There it was. An envelope from the mortgage company.

I went in to where my husband, Doug, was in the living room. We opened the letter together and started reading: Dear Mr. and Mrs. Crane, we regret to inform you that your request for another mortgage modification has been denied.... It went on with more financial mumbo jumbo, but that first sentence told us enough.

Doug let the letter fall to the floor. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re done.”

I gazed around the living room. Pictures of our three sons. The framed wedding photo above the mantel. Our furniture. Our whole life.

Two weeks earlier we’d received the foreclosure notice from the bank. We hadn’t panicked then because we were still waiting to hear about the loan modification. If we could bring those loan payments down we might figure out some way to hang on to our house.

Now the last door was closed. We had two weeks to move out. We were two weeks away from living on the streets.

I looked at Doug. He’s a stoic man, not one to complain or let his feelings show. But I could tell that he was as shaken as I was. How had we come to this?

Mentally I traced back through the last few years. Doug losing his job. My cancer diagnosis. This house we loved so much, where our three boys had grown into men and where we had raised our dog from a puppy.

Was it the house where we’d gone wrong? It was a big house, bigger than our family of five strictly needed. But that’s because when we bought it we’d thought that my parents would be moving in with us.

At the last minute they had backed out. Rochester, New York, where I grew up, is a lot chillier than Atlanta, but the rest of our family was there and so Mom and Dad decided to stay.

At the time Doug and I didn’t mind. Doug has been a hard worker all his life and he had a good-paying job doing woodwork and trim for a construction company owned by a friend. We could afford the mortgage payments plus raising three teenage boys.

We spread out in the big house. It was so nice to live in a quiet, relatively new development.

Even my cancer seemed manageable. In 2003, a year before we bought the house, I’d been diagnosed with a slow-progressing form of leukemia. Doctors said I had a good chance of outliving the disease but I needed to take better care of myself.

I switched to a healthy diet and took up exercise—regular walks with Lexi, our boxer, through the neighborhood. I’d been a receptionist at a hair salon, but my health issues meant I couldn’t work anymore.

Then the recession hit. One day Doug came home from work looking worried.

“I won’t be getting a paycheck this week,” he told me. His friend who owned the construction company had told Doug that a few contractors had failed to pay him. “He said that things should be back on track by next week,” Doug said.