I am realizing that it has once again been quite a while since I have written. Where does the time go? It hasn't felt like that long. With that said, I'm not really sure what I have to write about today. I think I'll tell you about how God spoke to me last night.
For the last 3 years or so my husband and I have struggled with employment and money. I don't think we are misusing the money God entrusts us with. We have no debt, we tithe and we've taken Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University... it's just that God doesn't give us much money to deal with. He's always given us enough to pay the bills. He doesn't give us much to go out to eat with and Christmas is more lean in our home than in most homes but we have always been able to pay our bills and we have always had filling meals on the table. Most months our bank account can only be described by the fishes and loaves story in the Bible.
Last night we discussed the finances and once again found ourselves paying what needed to be paid with only a few dollars left over and no money to repair our truck that has been sitting without a battery and with squealy brakes for the last few weeks. We thought for sure we would have the extra money to get this done with our last check. And Christian was telling me that his work was going to slow down with the summer.
I feel like we work our tails off and still have to deal with this. Frustrated I just looked up and said, "God, what do we have to do?" Almost immediately a verse popped into my head, "trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths." It hit me that in our (the world's) understanding we need to know that we are going to pay our bills every month, we need to know how much money we are going to make every month. God's ways are not our own. God knows how we are going to eat and keep the lights on.
Sometimes I wonder what we are doing wrong. We are properly using the things God gives us so shouldn't He give us more? That's what is in the Bible. The servant who was given money and invested it was praised and given more. The servant who hid the money afraid of doing wrong with it lost it. Maybe the Bible isn't referring to money in that story, more likely they are referring to the gifts and talents God has given us. I mean, Jesus did EVERYTHING right, literally, yet He had no money, no home, no assets of any kind. Neither did Paul. So being blessed financially isn't linked to having faith. I guess alot of people associate being blessed with finances. I guess that is a product of this world.
When I stop to think about being blessed, no we don't have a lot of money but we have amazing things. My marriage to Christian should not be as awesome as it is. There are so many factors that should be contributing to a stressful marriage, only one being a very tight budget. We don't fight. I have been in contact with several severely handicapped twins whose sibling passed away before birth. My son very well could not be healthy. We have been blessed with a landlord that takes care of us even tho we live in the middle of a section 8 neighborhood. We have been blessed with the knowledge to get ourselves out of debt. Funny, now that I think about it, we had money to pay our debts when we had them, you'd think that we'd have a little wiggle room now, but we still only have enough to get by. I could go on about our blessings.
Still, I wonder why God blesses some people with finances and not others. Why does God give some people health and others are always sick? Why do some married couples never fight and others are married 3 and 4 times? All these people are just as faithful as the other. Maybe this is something I'll look into and write about. Maybe I won't even find an answer, I heard somewhere that if we understood even a little of what God knows it would blow our minds, literally. I like that. I don't want to worship a being I completely understand, what would be the point? But maybe He might choose to give me some insight on this, we'll see.
Love you, brothers and sisters,
Cathy
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths." Proverbs 3:5-6
Your thoughts are always welcome!
Cathy, in your searching and praying, keep in mind that there's no promise from God that we can or should know or understand his reasons. Jaz and I have been struggling with a "Why?" question for about a year now, but I don't know if we'll ever have an answer and I think we're (finally) OK with it. That said, we might have a small hint of a smidgen of a whiff of some kind of answer... his timing is seldom in line with ours :-)
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