$26

You would think $26 wouldn’t make so much difference, but I remember that amount like it was the hinge my life swung on. And maybe at the time it did.

I was just weeks from having all of my college classes behind me (still had student teaching, but I had a summer to save for that). In three years of college, my funds had been stretched to almost enough with working and saving and hoping and praying. Somehow I had made it all the way to the last few weeks of the final semester, and I was only $26 short.

Looking back it seems such a piddly thing. But you have to understand my pride problem at the time. It was a big deal that I had been able to pay so much of my own tuition, room and board. And now here I was. I hadn’t budgeted well. I had failed.

If you know anything about me or about that time in my life, you know I was on a hunt for how I might be failing. I could be exceedingly successful in 99 areas, but if I fell short in one, I was sure I was a failure. Besides God, the people I most wanted to be proud of me were my parents. I had this thing about wanting to be perfect so they would love me (I see now how much time and energy I wasted down that black hole).

So here I was, home for the weekend, and that $26 was burning a hole through my brain. I had to tell them, but I definitely didn’t want to. I knew they would be mad. I knew it would brand me forever as a financial failure. Drama queen, I know, but I really wasn’t other than in my head. I told no one.

Then came the time to leave, and I just really didn’t have any other choice. I can still see that calf pen where they were working as I walked out there. The telling took no more than a few seconds. The feelings lasted almost 20 years.

As I accurately predicted, my mom was livid. Yes, she came and gave me the money, but it was clear she was not happy about it.

I may have re-lived with that moment forever but for a weird set of circumstances that forced me to get really honest with my parents about how I always felt one step away from certain and utter failure growing up. Now this was not something I would ever have brought up on my own. It was too painful, and the last thing I wanted was confirmation that they thought I was a failure.

However, that night the Holy Spirit shoved me into telling them. I couldn’t get out of it. And so I told them. I told them about much of my childhood feeling like I needed to be perfect to be loved, and feeling always like I’d failed horribly. Then, as an example, I brought up the $26.

It was the next day that my mom and I sat and talked about it again. She said, “I remember that. I didn’t remember the amount, but I remember when that happened. I wasn’t mad because you needed the money. I was mad because you waited until the last minute when I was busy to ask. You’d had all weekend. But I see now…”

“That’s why I waited. Because I really didn’t want to ask.”

She nodded. “I see that now. It was never that I was mad about the money, but I can see how you thought it was.”

Twenty stinking years I spent with that dumb $26 taking up space on loop in my brain. As hard as it was to say something, I’m so glad the Holy Spirit finally made me. That space is so much better used for other things.

How many $26 misunderstandings are you carrying around? Isn’t it time you made peace with them and spent your time and energy on something really worthwhile? I know it was for me.

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