Can God use the worst possible things that could happen to us for good?
Like many Calvin alumni, Ruth Hollander Soukup ’00 asked that question, and for many years she couldn’t come up with an encouraging answer.
On the cusp of graduating from Calvin, the Bellingham, Wash., native slid into a deep depression and despite the help of professors and other caring community members, Soukup spent two-and-a-half years in a spiral downward.
“I experienced everything that’s awful—suicide attempts, divorce, bankruptcy,” she said. “A very patient dad and good counsel from a therapist eventually gave me the determination to get beyond all of the bad stories in my life.”
She finished her degree and tried law school. While law didn’t stick she did meet her husband, Chuck, and started a family.
Also, at this time, Soukup, who lost her faith for a time during her depression, found herself and her husband brought her back to God and the church by the Spirit’s persistent work. Life was coming together.
But this challenging journey had a number of twists and turns to come. Soukup was still having difficulty determining her vocation and in the meantime had developed out-of-control spending habits that put her marriage in danger.
“I decided that one way to control my behavior was to document everything I was doing with money and to blog about my experiences,” she said.
Although she was not an experienced blogger, her writing skills and the important topic quickly drew others to her site.
“Handling one’s finances well is a topic that resonates with people,” she said. “We’re filling the holes in our lives with stuff we don’t need. Culture says that more stuff is the answer, so we find ourselves in stores. The holes that we have, only Christ can fill.”
Today, Soukup’s blog and web site Living Well and Spending Less draws over a million-and-a-half visitors each month. Her newsletter has 200,000 subscribers. The striking success of her work led to a book of the same name, published by Zondervan and a bestseller on the New York Times self-help book list.
Three other self-published books have also sold well and a second book through Zondervan titled Unstuffed is due in the spring of 2016.
“I never in a million years would have imagined all of this to happen,” she said. “That’s probably true for my Calvin professors, too. The college’s writing-based curriculum helped develop this ability in me—although I refer to myself as grammatically lucky. I could hear how the words were supposed to come together without always understanding why.”
Soukup’s work is so successful that her husband was able to quit his job to care for their two daughters and she employs five people to help with the website, books and promotional activities.
“God has used my story and my brokenness to reach others in deeply meaningful ways,” she said. “I try to first speak to the practical issues of life and then leave a door open to speak to the heart.”
