When wealth drifts away, faith takes flight. Three families share the way their journey challenged them

Rebecca’s Story

Over the years of our challenge, I resented it when people would say to me, “If your problem can be solved with money, then you don’t have a problem.” I don’t agree. So many problems come from having no money — relationships suffer; mental, physical, and spiritual health suffer. It’s never just about the money.

It was a combination of factors that brought us to our knees financially. My husband is an anesthesiologist specializing in interventional pain medicine — a field that uses procedures like injections and minimally invasive surgeries to manage pain — and I was a stay-at-home mom. My husband did well, and we lived an upper middle-class life in a classy neighborhood, with a beautiful home and a pool. Our five children were all in private school.

Then in 2008, a hurricane hit our South Carolina area, destroying many homes (thankfully, not ours). The base of my husband’s practice was elderly people who’d come down from the East Coast in the winter to get away from the cold. Now that their winter homes were destroyed, they no longer came.

There was also an economic downturn in the country that year, and since interventional pain medicine is a fringe practice, many people could no longer afford to pay for such treatment.

In November, after the Yamim Tovim, which is usually when things get busy, the phone was dead. No calls came through, no appointments were made. We had two employees’ salaries to cover, a large office rental lease to pay, and all our bills.

It was scary. How were we going to do this?

Although my husband had been doing well financially, between the high cost of living in our ritzy neighborhood and the exorbitant tuitions (with no breaks), we had no savings. So now, when his income had been reduced to close to zero, we plunged immediately into debt.