A Break In The Darkness

I have a little eclipse story to tell.

My husband and I were lucky enough to live within driving distance of the path of totality, where the moon would completely blot out the sun.  As soon as I found that out, I decided we were going to have to make a day of it and drive north to see THE REAL THING.  I perused blogs and astronomy websites; I purchased multiple sets of eclipse glasses (after the first set turned out to be fake - thanks Amazon); I had happy daydreams about laying out in the sun in a green field, slowly watching the moon eat the sun, and then perfectly witnessing all of the crazy things happen during a total eclipse.  I was especially excited to see the eclipse itself.  I badgered my husband into taking the day off.  We may never get to see this again!  It will be amazing and it's only a few hours away!  Pleeeeeeeeease.  Pleaseplease.  

The night before, I checked the forecast one last time and found to my dismay that essentially everyone in the path of totality was going to have a spotty view of the eclipse except people living just east of the Rockies, which we do not.  Weather in our town was meant to be perfect, but of course without the chance to view all of the amazing phenomena that come with a complete eclipse.  My husband and I talked it over and decided to take the chance.  Better to potentially see THE REAL THING than to definitely not see it.

Cut to the morning of.  We left late, first of all, which - although I'm not a very nervous person - sent my nerves through the roof.  It's not like the moon is going to hold off on beginning the meeting because there are still some stragglers coming in.  Then the clouds started gathering as we drove.  At first it was just some cheerful light clumps, but after a couple of hours it was clear we were heading into a storm system.  My husband got one glimpse of the very beginning of the eclipse while we were on the road.  Then, nothing.  Clouds.

My pastor recently had been teaching us about improbable prayers.  He pointed out that in Acts when Peter was headed for execution, the church prayed for his release and he was indeed broken out of prison by an angel.  When he showed up at the house where they'd been praying, they were amazed!  His point was this: pray for things so incredible that if they happen, you will be shocked.  Pray for improbable things.  Give God that chance.

Well, why not, I thought.  Driving that morning, every time I looked up at the dense cloud cover, I prayed.  I know this isn't particularly important, Lord, but please.  Please clear the weather so we can view this spectacle.  In fact, clear it so everyone can view it.  Please make a way in this.

And you know what happened?  It started raining.  Yeah.  Raining.  On and off for the last hour or so of the drive, it sprinkled and poured by turns.  We didn't see another glimpse of the sun that entire time.  I kept praying but my mood gradually soured.  Come on, God, please?  Let everyone see the eclipse during totality, including us!  Matt kept an eye on the radar, but there was no chance that we could outrun the huge bank of clouds in the region, no chance that we could cut east or west and find a clear spot within our little slice of totality.  We were stuck.  So we kept to the original plan, although there was no happiness in it for me anymore.

When we got to the park I'd chosen, it was dark, cold, and wet.  The rain had settled into a steady light shower.  There was no way to tell if the appearance of things was from the storm or the developing eclipse, but you can guess what my suspicions were.  We found a low hill with good visibility only because Matt insisted.  I was ready to sit in a low parking lot and read a bloody book just to spite the stupid eclipse and the rain and the day and everything.  I pulled out my knitting, for goodness' sake, because why not?  There was nothing to see.  I can see clouds and rain whenever I want.  There was certainly no way to appreciate anything else.

I let myself talk to God about the whole endeavor one last time.  I asked you for such a little thing, God.  I've been looking forward to this for weeks and You know that.  You couldn't have given me this?  Thanks a lot.

Matt opened the car door.  "Get out.  You can see the sky, Zoe, get out of the car."  Well, duh, I thought.  Of course you can see the sky; you can always see the sky.  I want to see the sun.  But I abruptly got sick of my own bad mood and decided to play at being a good sport.  I got out of the car and peered up into the rain.  Sure enough, there was an odd-looking dark grey patch briefly visible through the clouds.  Matt nudged me.  "I think that is blue sky."  The more I looked, the more I thought he must be right.  

It got darker all of a sudden.  Darker.  Then, still darker.  A cold wind blew across the hill.  People started to murmur, wow, so cool, how about this.  Suddenly the horizon looked like it was on fire - all the most amazing sunset colors at once, spread out in all directions.  Diffused as it was through cloud cover and distant rainfall, the effect was especially mysterious.  Crickets started chirping and all the birds landed.  I grudgingly thought, okay God, this is pretty cool.  Thanks for this at least.  

Then people started screaming. 

I mean really screaming, in a way that was frightening and seemed out of their control.  We heard more screaming from across the park and even, faintly, the nearby town.  I realised everyone was pointing up.  And there, right overhead, the dense clouds had cleared perfectly in the right spot for us to have a great view of the total solar eclipse.  We got to see about thirty seconds of perfect corona leading into the diamond ring signaling the end of totality.  It was uniquely beautiful and unsettling in a way that eludes description.  We all felt a brief, hot wash of sunlight as totality truly ended.  Then the clouds closed up again.

I cried, of course.  Not at the eclipse itself, although it is something I will remember for the rest of my life.  I cried because God reminded me that a faith that endures is one that endures to the end of hope, through the disappointment and rain, trusting that there will be a break in the darkness.  He could have whisked all of the clouds away and left us with a "perfect" cloudless sky and the chance to see the entire eclipse process without interruption.  He chose not to.  But did He not answer my prayer (and surely the hopeful prayers of many others) in spectacular fashion and in a way that imprinted the event into our minds forever?  Cold, darkness, and rain!  A sense that time was running out!  Then - the clouds opening!  A perfect glimpse of THE REAL THING!  The return of the warmth of the sun!  End scene.  

Amazing.  Never doubt God created the concept of dramatic tension.

I am really sorry that I gave up on God answering my prayer too early.  And how kind of Him to package my subtle rebuke as a rare, beautiful gift and reminder of His faithfulness and majesty. 

The lesson is this: if He cares enough and is powerful enough to even just move the clouds so we can see something cool, how much more able and willing is He to help with the things that truly matter?  At the same time, when I pray that He would get rid of all the clouds and give me a nice sunny sky, I have to remember that often that is not His way, because when He does that I learn nothing and do not grow.  I thought that day that THE REAL THING was having good weather and seeing the full eclipse.  But in this, as in all things, that was just a cipher for what the Lord was truly doing for me that day - teaching me to trust Him more and being willing to risk disappointment and loss based on that trust.

OH HEY LET'S TALK ABOUT MONEY

In honor of everyone graduating and moving on to the next step, let's talk about money!  And by money I mean debt, because new doctors don't have any money!  All we have is bills to pay!

So I am the one who does the money things in our household.  It really happened by accident.  Matt was deployed shortly after we got married, before we had fully decided our financial plan as a couple, so all daily responsibilities were de facto handed off to me.  By the time he got back a year later, all the accounts and whatnot had my passwords on them and all the bills auto-debited out of my checking account so I could keep track of them (insofar as a medical student can keep track of anything besides the filtration system of a nephron).  Over the years of our marriage it has taken on a comfortable, natural sort of balance where we check in regularly with each other and the bills are somewhat more evenly distributed, but I still do the weekly bookkeeping and the nuts and bolts of our budget.  I like it.  It's like folding towels, which I also like - a nice, sequential task where the corners line up neatly with the bonus of a visibly completed task when I'm finished. 

That calm, simple task (money, not towels) kind of exploded once I graduated residency and everything changed.  Matt graduated law school and started working full time.  I switched from a modest salaried job to a higher-paid-but-extremely-variable hourly job.  We bought a house.  We sold a car and bought another one.  And oh, yeah - all of our student loans came due. 

I knew in a vague way during training that we had a lot of debt.  I would glance at it out of the corner of my eye from time to time, but everything was in forbearance or deferment, so nothing was due.  Out of sight, out of mind, amirite?  It felt insubstantial to me, like a theoretical concept.  And it's not like there was a way around it.  If we wanted to complete the training we had begun, then massive debt was part of the package.  Here I will also admit that I had a naïve, trusting sense that if my school didn't think we students would be able to pay the money back as physicians, surely they wouldn't be helping to get us all in such debt, right?  So I ignored it and kept working and surviving, and all the while the law of compounding interest ticked quietly away in the background.  I knew our debt was mumble-mumble-hundred-thousand-mumble-and-change, but I literally only checked it every few years when I was forced to.  And I had never even looked at Matt's student loans.  Law school was slightly less per year than medical school and it was a year shorter.  That was the full extent of my knowledge.

There is a reason that if you listen to Dave Ramsey and a caller states they have six figure student loan debt, he asks who the doctor or lawyer is.  It's because we accumulate student loan debt on a scale that most people never conceive of, and that's on top of "normal" things like credit cards and cars and family debt and having a mortgage.

When I took a deep breath and did the arithmetic, we were about $750,000 in debt.

Quite a number, isn't it.

Of course, I didn't add all of that up until about a year ago.  I promptly panicked.  It was only then that Matt and I finally sat down over lunch with a napkin and a pen and hashed out the basics of our repayment plan.  Could we have done it sooner?  Eh, maybe, but we didn't have all the numbers we needed to do the proper math, like my expected monthly income.  I certainly don't think we could have waited any longer than we did without ending up in some trouble, though.

Over the past year, I've learned a few things about money, which was necessary as I abruptly found out I knew nothing whatsoever about money other than basic budgeting.  Change was time consuming and mostly driven by need as we ran into financial thing after financial thing.  My colleague told me a horror story about blindly paying the minimums on her student loans for 10 years only to find out she still owed $150k, so we learned about refinancing and put all our loans on a seven year term with a better lender than the government.  We had cosigned a loan for a friend forever ago who was having trouble (please do not ever ever ever cosign anything for a friend EVER), so we learned about how to finally get some control of that loan to keep it from vomiting all over our credit.  I started listening to Dave Ramsey and reading The White Coat Investor.  We found out how behind we are on retirement stuff, yay.  And we finally got in the habit of throwing buckets and buckets and buckets of money at our debts.  We have paid a few small things off, which felt like a triumph.  The rest won't go away without years of consistent effort.

Here's roughly what our budget looks like now, in terms of percentage of our monthly income:

Tithe - 10%
Student loan payments ~ 40-50%
Retirement savings - 6%
Mortgage/ house stuff ~ 10%
Car payments ~ 6%
Other ~ 20-30%

I put things in the order we generally pay them.  It's not quite a painful way to live since we live in a cheap area of the country and we have never had a lot of money to spend anyway.  But I still worry sometimes, and clearly the two of us cannot afford to do less than work full time at the jobs we currently have for the next 5-7 years.  I especially always feel like that big retirement chunk hurts to lose, even though the reasons for it are sound.  We've settled into the plan and things are stable and workable.  I feel immensely thankful for that, considering how much worse it could be.  But I have to say... it's not really fun to have half your income going to student loan debt and to know that can't change for almost as long as it took to accumulate that debt.

I was talking to a premed student a while ago and she was telling me she got into multiple medical schools, but wasn't sure which one to choose.  One was the local state school.  The other was a private school in California.  We talked for a while about the similarities and differences, and then I offhandedly asked if there was much of a price difference between the two.  She turned sheepish.  Turns out the fancy California school was $30k more per year and she wanted to do family medicine.  I kinda lost it on her.  $30k per year becomes $120k on graduation becomes $150k after residency becomes a $2000 difference in monthly payments for 5-10 years.  Not very socially appropriate of me to lay it out like that, but she had never looked at it that way.  Last I heard she was headed to the state school.

So why bring all of this up?  Because no one ever talks to med students, residents, and doctors about money and it can really hurt us.  We shouldn't go to extremely expensive medical schools really ever, but especially not if we want to go into primary care.  We shouldn't take the max student loans out when it will cost us literally thousands extra a few years down the road.  We should learn about budgeting and investing and taxes and talk about it with each other so hopefully we can stop making dumb mistakes (example: I literally realized today that I have to be careful about how much money goes into my retirement account now because apparently there's a fee if I go over some arbitrary limit the IRS set.  This is called a contribution limit and it's really basic and I had no idea).  If it were just about money it wouldn't matter.  But as I explained to that premed student, money = freedom.  Freedom to have a long parental leave when you have kids.  Freedom to take low-paying work and get to missionary work sooner.  Freedom to support missionaries and sponsor lots of kids through Compassion International.  Freedom to leave medicine if you want.  Freedom to take a freaking vacation.  The list goes on.

So, med students, residents, fellow new docs, educate yourself as early as you can.  Treat debt like the enemy it is.  And talk to each other. 

Saying No

Teach more? Full-time academics? More emergency medicine work? Free clinic work? This week I said no to all of it.

When I was a teenager I perpetually went through boom and bust cycles of activity, where I would overextend myself for weeks or months at a time and then abruptly become an unreliable hermit for a while once my energy bottomed out. I always felt guilty about that. Other people seemed able to sustain one pace without suddenly giving out here and there. So once I got a bit older I became a committed believer in the power of 'no' to change your life. I started saying no to things all the time. I'm not going to do that. I won't be attending that thing. I will not be able to help you with that. No. No. No. And my life got a lot better.

Then residency happened. Residency is essentially one giant YES. You have one option to say no, and that is at the very beginning. If you say yes to residency, you have inherently said yes to everything in residency.* I'm not proud of how I handled that overall, but I am grateful that God brought me through it. I think.

I'm in an interesting stage right now where I have too many wonderful opportunities. Talk about job security - I could honestly work as much as I wanted and have as many jobs as I wanted, all of them good positions. This is new territory and it brings up old bad habits. For me, it's a real struggle to look at all of the ways that I could be helping people and growing and contributing and collaborating - and to have to say no to so many of them. I have to remind myself that I already have two jobs where I work more than full time and am climbing more than one challenging learning curve. It's enough. Often it's more than enough and I wish I could dial back even more than I already have. But there's so much more that can be done. There's so much more to do.

While I don't have a solution, it's a good problem to have. Can I say for certain that I'm glad that I didn't quit residency? No, I can't. But maybe one day.

*Don't get me wrong, there's always something optional enough that you can get away with saying no. I said no to everything I could. It just wasn't enough.