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The fear I felt as I lost it all, and how I recovered

Adam Walker
5 min readMar 20, 2020

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Photo by Tim Trad on Unsplash

The moment I met real fear

There is one moment in my life when fear washed over me more powerfully than ever before. It was a phone call I will never forget.

A few months before, my wife and I had started a church in Decatur, GA. We wanted to start something that could serve and love the community in a new way. As a part of that process, we had to raise support. In our support raising, several months earlier, we found Molly (not her real name, but close ;) ).

Molly popped up out of the blue. She found my blog and started emailing me questions, which I was happy to answer. Then, she asked how she might support our church plant. I didn’t have a good answer, so I gave her a link to my Amazon wish list, which included books on church planting. Molly bought me every book on the list, more than $500 worth. That got my attention.

After that, Molly asked how she might financially contribute to supporting our new church. I still didn’t know her well, and her story about how she had money and why she wanted to give it to a stranger was a little odd, so I was cautious.

My family needed to move to Decatur to start the church, so my conversations with Molly turned toward her donating money to help with that. Initially, she promised to give $800 per month, then later, she raised that to a little more than $1,000 per month. I was still a little skeptical, so I told my wife we couldn’t start looking for a place until the first check cleared the bank.

The check came and cleared the bank, so we went looking for a place to rent. Decatur was an expensive town, so we ended up finding a house for our family that was $1,500 per month, most of which would be covered by Molly, thankfully. We moved to Decatur, and things were great, for a while.

Month two came, and the check from Molly came as planned. The church plans were going well. Money was tight, though. We were getting about $1,000 per month from Molly, $1,000 per month from our parent church, a few hundred dollars a month from individual donors, and all the rest of our income came from my picking up website projects here and there.

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Adam Walker
Adam Walker

Written by Adam Walker

Husband. Father of six. Wearer of fedoras. Serial entrepreneur. Nonprofit co-founder. I write about personal growth & leadership.

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