The Day I Sold My Childhood

In December 2018 my family and I set off on a “sabbatical”. The previous years in Brazil, although fruitful, had left us exhausted. We needed a break.

We first went to Kansas City to spend Christmas with family and attend the last Onething conference at IHOPKC. That conference was a once-in-a-lifetime disappointing crap fest. But that’s not the story for today.

After the New Year, we headed to Florida for our sabbatical. It ended up being 3 months from hell. We were broke as all get out and even though someone had been extremely generous with us and rented us a house to stay in, we had nothing to do. We were stuck in a town 45 minutes from anyone we knew. The only highlight was our weekly trip every Tuesday to the Open Door House of Prayer.

The longer we spent in Florida, the more we all felt that change was coming.

It was a horribly difficult decision, but we decided to leave Brazil and move back to the United States. It’s a bit of a story, but again, not the story for today.

As our pre-determined sabbatical was coming to a close I decided to go back to Brazil before we officially moved. I wanted to take advantage of every minute back there with my friends and the life that I loved. The rest of my family stayed in the United States to figure out where we were going to move.

I went back by myself, and by that point, everyone knew that we were moving.

I had no idea what I was about to face. It was 3 of the best and most painful months. I took full advantage of my time there with my friends. But every time we would say goodbye at the end of the night we knew it was a ticking clock. I was leaving. Everything was changing.

I jumped back on my old worship team. I wanted my life to feel “normal”. I think I wanted everything to feel like nothing was changing, although everything was changing.

I stayed with a few different friends during those few months. Little did I know that while I was staying with a certain family they were sowing discord in the church and prayer room trying to cause a church split and keep my parents from ever preaching on the stage they built again. It was just great.

As the days crept on, logistics had to be taken care of. What were we going to do with all our stuff? Where were we going to move within the US?

We realized that it would be too expensive to ship all of our stuff back to the US. It made more sense to sell it all in Brazil and then buy new things when we got to wherever we were going to live.

Makes sense right? Logically it does.

It was the right decision, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t suck.

No one ever talks about what it’s like to sell everything you own and move. And this was the second time I was doing it.

Unlike the first time we did it moving to Brazil, this felt less exciting. We weren’t naive anymore. We didn’t know where we were moving to yet. There was nothing exciting to look forward to.

My dad later joined me in Brazil to help get the church ready to be passed on, sell our donut shop, and sell our stuff.

Before our sabbatical, our landlord wanted the house back. So we put everything in storage assuming we would come back and find a new house. Instead, we had everything we owned dropped off at the prayer room for a week-long garage sale.

The generosity I saw in people during that week was unrivaled. People spent hours and hours getting everything ready to sell. They helped unbox and set up an entire family’s belongings in a massive garage sale. And then took shifts managing the sale.

I was there from 9am to 10pm every day. Then I went home and did school because I was still a full-time college student. I then got up at 6am to go workout with my trainer on the other side of the city, because I was extra. I should have taken a break from school and training to deal with everything for that week. But I didn’t want to feel like I was “failing” at anything.

I could do it all.

Only recently can I think about this week without breaking down into tears. “Hard” would be the understatement of the century.

My dad and I were the only family members there. I had to call my mom and show her all the stuff so she could decide what she wanted to keep and what she wanted to sell.

There are still moments when we think of something that we forgot to bring back with us. It still hurts. Every time I go back to Brazil I see our stuff everywhere in all of our friend’s houses.

The sale went on for 5 days. We sold almost everything. People from all over came and bought stuff. It was a success.

But I wasn’t just dealing with my emotions that week. I was dealing with everyone’s emotions.

Everyone was heartbroken that we were leaving. I was heartbroken.

I would be grabbed every 5 minutes for someone to tell me “This is too expensive” or “This price should be higher”. I didn’t want to think about how much to sell my jewelry for or all of my mom’s casserole dishes.

My all-time favorite quote from that week was “You should be crying more”. I was crying plenty that week, just not in front of everyone.

Actually, I cried almost every day for those 3 months. Every day on my drive home to wherever I was staying I would listen to Colony House and cry.

So I think I did cry enough.

I watched as my clothes were sold. All my favorite books. All my craft supplies that people had brought down for me from the States. All the decorations and paintings that hung in my room for the past 6 years were suddenly gone.

When we moved to Brazil in 2013, everything that we brought was special. We purged through all of our stuff and brought down the things that mattered most. Everything had so much value, it was the most important things from my childhood.

You have no idea how much sentimental value things have until you don’t have them anymore. The decoration and artwork in my room always brought comfort and peace when I walked into my room, and I had to sell it.

If it couldn’t fit in a suitcase, we couldn’t take it.

Between the intermittent people coming up to me to cry about us leaving, there were also people trying to take advantage of us. I don’t think it was necessarily on purpose, but I wasn’t having it.

Someone came up to me with one of my mother’s teapots. It was $R60 (about $12USD). She asked for a discount because it reminded her of my mother and she wanted to have it as a keepsake.

I could feel the manipulation, trying to get a little extra discount out of me and using my mom, and my family, moving away to get it.

I said no.

I was done with feeling like I didn’t have a choice. She could pay the sticker price or not. It was a nice teapot, someone else would have bought it.

But someone from our church overheard the conversation and said he would buy it for her.

We moved to Brazil in a 40-foot container. We moved back to the United States in 13 suitcases.

But we couldn’t bring all those 13 suitcases back at once. It took 2 years of trips to Brazil for us to get them all back.

So many special items, birthday presents, handwritten cards, and all my old Bible summaries were left behind. It was impractical to bring it all back.

When we finally got to where we decided to move, Denver, we had to build our lives again from zero.

It sounds fun to go into a store and buy all new stuff.

It isn’t really. At least not after we’d done it 6 years prior when we first moved to Brazil.

That week was brutal. I was bone tired by the end of each day but still had to write papers for college. And all the while some people were still trying to start a coo in the church.

It was exhausting.

I think back to that week now and then. It was the week I sold my childhood.

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Photo by Mihail Macri on Unsplash