Sometimes, things may be hopeless and you need to grieve. When Sarah got sick, I knew in my gut, this wasn’t something I could heal in anyway. She was very old after all, and the diagnosis was bad. It was time. You can feel that energy of endings, and you just submit to it.
Then there’s the miracles.
Whenever my friends are facing hopeless situations, I tell them about Cowboy Dave.
Years ago, during the time everyone had crazy adjustable mortgages, when the housing crisis occurred, we were faced with the challenge of selling our beloved home. We’d be there for four years, and truly loved it, but we felt stuck in an ever-expanding payment that was growing unreasonable. To make matters worst, my husband quit a job he truly enjoyed, but he had to make a tough decision, because he was being treated so horribly and unfairly at work, he felt he had no choice.
We went through what most folks had to go through–the awful feeling of threatening letters coming in the mail, and the overwhelming worry about losing our home. We decided to try and sell our home and went through two different realtors. Things were getting closer and closer to the wire where we were running out of time and the house would be in foreclosure.
Help arrived! A couple came to the door and handed us brochures. With smooth-butter voices they promised to take the house off our hands and hand us $10,000 to run away and start a new life. My head ached at the time, like it does when negativity is sqirming around me. I protested.
The wife’s smile turned into a straight line, and her fists gripped the couch. Her husband turned on his bully button. “You have no choice!” he yelled. He explained they were the only option and we were crazy to turn down this deal. “This is reality and how things are. You’ll walk away with nothing,” he shouted at us.
When they left, we felt bullied and destroyed. It was like a huge hole grew into the ground and we fell right down into it.
And I then got weird guidance.
We were to expect more. Expect miracles. We called the bully couple back and told them no. We were throwing ourselves into the mercy of God and the Universe. It was crazy and illogical.
Two days later, we got a phone call from the realtor. A man wanted to check out the house.
Cowboy Dave, we later affectionately called him, was another realtor from a different company. He was a little old man with a big cowboy hat and a smile that lit up the room. He let his buyer in and then explained to us that this man was given a long list of houses to consider and he pointed to ours. “This is the house I want,” he had said. He lovingly went room to room and the air popped with his excitement. We waited in anticipation for his decision.
Only a few days later, we got his offer. We made over $80,000 in our sale. This was at a time when the house crisis just began, and houses were not selling, much less for the asking price.
When I am feeling like a situation is looking beyond hopeless, I ask myself if it has that ending energy and I need to acquiesce and accept, or do I need to ask and wait for a Cowboy Dave moment.
