How Going Broke Made Me Rich

A while back, I lost everything.

Not "everything" the way people say it after a rough quarter. I mean I opened my banking app one day and saw a number with no digits in front of the decimal. Zero. The kind of zero that makes you sit very still for a minute.

I'd been earning a million dollars a year. And then I wasn't earning anything at all.

Here's the strange part, and it's the reason for this post and the episode it goes with: losing it might be the best thing that ever happened to me.

If you've ever been afraid of losing what you've built — or you're in the middle of losing it right now — stay with me.

"The recent unpleasantness"

I've started calling it that, with a little wink, "the recent unpleasantness" (what's that movie? Anyone know?).

It began with Parkinson's. Then the pandemic, which was not a gentle season for anyone running a business. Then shoulder surgery. Then brain surgery — and I want you to notice I just dropped "brain surgery" in next to "shoulder surgery" like I was listing errands.

Add a few business decisions I'd love to have back, some personal ones I'd file in the same drawer, medical bills that arrived looking like phone numbers, and overhead that had grown to the size of a small kingdom. Underneath all of it, quietly, a crisis of faith. Not a wobble. A genuine dark night of the soul, the kind St. John of the Cross wrote about, where God seems to have left the room and shut the door, and you stand in the dark wondering if any of it was ever real. 

At the bottom of it, I declared bankruptcy.

I'm not telling you this to perform my suffering. I'm not complaining. We're rebuilding, and I'm a new man — by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I mean that as plainly as I can say it.

So here's the question I had to ask myself. When I say going broke made me rich, is that just a clever line? A copywriter's sleight of hand? Or can a man say a thing like that and be telling the truth?

It's true. Here's how.

What was actually load-bearing

When you get stripped all the way down, you find out what was holding the house up.

I'd built a life with a lot of stuff in it. Income. Status. A reputation in my corner of the marketing world. The comfort of knowing the bills were handled and then some. None of that is wrong. I'm not here to tell you money is the problem and poverty is the cure — that's a sermon people preach when they've never actually been broke, and it's nonsense.

What happened was simpler. Everything that wasn't essential got taken away, and I was left holding only what was. And the list of things that are truly essential turns out to be far shorter than the list of things I'd convinced myself I couldn't live without.

Corrie Ten Boom said it better than I can: you don't learn that Jesus is all you need until the day He's all you have. 

I used to read that as a needlepoint-pillow kind of line. Then I lived it, and it stopped being a pillow and became the floor I was standing on. Because when you've got nothing left but God, you find out fast