Never Surrender Blogfest

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I am thrilled to be participating this week in the Never Surrender Blogfest, hosted by Elana Johnson.

Surrender has been out for less than a week and it is all kinds of awesome.

For this blogfest, we are supposed to blog about a time we didn't give up. When we didn't surrender. I've blogged before about hard things I've accomplished in my life. But today I'm gonna focus on one that I've been thinking about lately...and is really more a story of how my husband didn't surrender.

I admit that today, my family and I are pretty well off. I don't have to work outside of the home, my husband runs his own very successful business and we live in a large gorgeous home on a nice chunk of land with all the fancy trimmings of a comfortable lifestyle. I have everything I could ever want, but it hasn't always been that way.

At one point in our marriage (ten-ish years ago), we had two toddlers (and I was pregnant with #3) and were scraping by. After doing whatever he had to to support his family (the man is a stud-we are talking working waist deep all day long harvesting prawns, catching frogs to sell to local restaurants, even running an ice-cream truck...yeah), my husband landed a decent job working the night shift as a security guard at the local resort (his watch alarm would go off at 10:15 every night to remind him to head out the door). Of course, he was also going to school full time at the local college, taught several classes of martial arts, and had two very demanding responsibilities in our church. Basically, we'd watch him sleep.

One day, he came to me and said he wanted to start his own business. He quit the steady job, dropped out of school, and we took one giant leap of faith into entrepreneurism. And it was not an overnight success. We lived on nothing. In fact, I remember one entire week in which all we had to eat was rice. One night I tried mixing rice with tuna water. Another night, soy sauce. One of the biggest blessings I received that year was learning how to make bread in my church group. Now we could have rice pizzas. :)

It was rough, but we kept going. And so did the business. Slowly, it grew, and after months and months of sacrifice on our part, we had enough to buy a home. And then, a better one. And then, a bigger one, and cars for cash. Until, suddenly, we were pretty dang comfortable. Even though most people we know now think we are lucky to be 'rich,' I will never forget everything we went through to get here, and I'll never ever take what we have now for granted. Never.

I'm not a fool. I know the hand of providence played a vital role in our story, but I also know that we didn't give up. We didn't surrender. 'Til this day, my husband's watch alarm rings at 10:15 pm as a reminder of where we came from, and as gratitude for where we are now. And that's enough to keep me going through whatever life decides to throw at me today.

*the good old days*