Monday, January 28, 2008

God's Smuggler

Another mild overcast day here in middle TN., currently 55 degrees. I am always impressed, delighted and feeling blessed about the weather here.

Well even though it is a new year, we still seem to have our same old struggles and vices. With a family our size money always seems to be an issue. Today I was talking with DH and re-evaluating our budget. He struggles so much with pride and being able to take care of his family. When there is "more month at the end of the money" to quote an old country song, he feels helpless. I can also see how it affects his faith a bit. I seem to be the faith cheerleader in our relationship, which is odd since my religious upbringing was pretty hit and miss; while he is a PK (pastor's kid). Today he made the comment that he just didn't make enough money to meet our needs. That really irked me since we were just finishing a discussion on if we were the best stewards of our own money. I thought we had decided we could do better. So it took me another 15 minutes or so to get him to see that just praying to God for "more money" wasn't going to work as long as we weren't taking care of the money we already had. I tried to make the illustration of a kid not taking care of his bike but asking his father for a car. Think he started to get it then. So we talked about how we always manged. We talked about examples of when "blessings" showed up just in time to keep the lights on or get some gas to make it to work the next day. We even talked about the correlation of tithing and the blessings coming. He finely got it, but it is so hard sometimes to have that faith.

I brought up a book we are almost finished reading with the children for school called "God's Smuggler", written by Brother Andrew with John & Elizabeth Sherrill. In a nut shell it is about a man who smuggled bibles behind the Iron Curtain after the war into communist Europe. It is such a wonderful book on missionary work and most importantly about total faith and dependence on God. Paragraph after paragraph is example oh how God provided everything for this man, from the money for his schooling,finding a wife and the funds for his work. At one point they needed money so bad to print bibles that that they decided that they would sell there own house, even though they and their 3 children had nowhere to go. As soon as they made the decision to make that sacrifice for God's work, the money/blessing came and they kept their house. I could go on and on about this book, but I digress. I reminded my DH that at one point in the book that Brother Andrew while praying for a wife decided to keep a prayer journal. He would recorded the date of his prayer, what he prayed for and any answer he received. I suggested that maybe DH might consider doing the same. It might help him see the trees through the forest so to speak.

An interesting final conclusion here. Minutes after coming downstairs from our talk, we checked the mail and there was a "blessing" in it. Two hours later DH got a call on a car job also for this week, insuring that the gas bill would be paid in time and that we would have gas money and enough for milk and diapers as well! God is so amazing!!!!

Blessings, Beth Ann

No comments: