“I think God is telling us to tithe,” I told my husband. “OK,” he replied. And we did. Except we started with 5% instead of the 10%. Finances were extremely tight and we weren’t brave enough to give more.

Three things you should know before I continue.

First, we were living at the time in a cramped two bedroom trailer with two small
children and a dog. Our nine year old daughter had one bedroom, and my five year old son shared the master bedroom with my husband and me. When we bought the trailer, the plan was to live in it for five years then buy a house. Now it was ten years later and we were no closer to buying a house than when we bought the trailer.

Second, I was the one who managed our family finances. I paid the bills and watched our bank account dip into the red each month. Credit cards became our best friend. So I KNEW we couldn’t afford a house. No way!

Third, at that time we were as spiritually challenged as we were financially challenged. We had been strong not many years before this – attending church and prayer meetings, reading the Bible, listening to teaching tapes, and reading books – but one by one these things fell away until we were doing none of it.

A month or so before I approached my husband with the idea of tithing, I had felt God’s call to come back. I began reading the Bible daily again and eventually came across God’s challenge in Malachi. This is how I read chapter 3, verses 8-10:

“Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How are we robbing You?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse… because you are robbing me… test Me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”

I felt convicted and knew I had to do something about this. That’s when I went to my husband, who simply said OK and continued playing his computer game. Simple for him, I thought. He’s not the one who has to juggle the finances.

The next month I made the first contribution. Not to a church since we were not attending one, but to a couple of ministries that I had heard about on TV. Four months later, January of 1996, my husband, out of the blue, announced it was time to buy a house. Yeah, right. But we went looking anyway. I told him we needed to stick to under 100K. After weeks of not finding anything we liked, the realtor told him about two houses, each around 150K. To humor them, I agreed to look at them.

We named the first house the White House because, although it wasn’t white on the outside, everything inside was white – the walls, the cabinets, even the carpeting. As we drove away from it, I pushed the button to lower the side window of our minivan so I could take a picture of the house as I had done with all the previous houses. Only this time the window wouldn’t go back up. I froze all the way home, worried about how to pay to have the window fixed. But the next day the window worked find. In fact, the only other time it ever got stuck was when we looked at the other 150K house.

Praying about it with some friends, we interpreted the open window as God’s way of saying we had an open door to either of those houses. Our pick. We chose the White House because I had always wanted a two story house. Lots of space!

It took a few more signs from God (dream, prophetic word, and a scripture) to convince me to trust Him but a month later we were signing the papers! The realtor commented that he had never seen a sale go through as smoothly and quickly as this one had. We used all our savings (money we had put aside each month for the summer months as, being educators, we didn’t get paid in the summer) for the down payment. My dad agreed to loan us money to make it through that first summer.

I LOVED the house, but still continued to worry about finances. Each month I thought making the mortgage payment was going to put us under – but it didn’t. Not only did we have enough to pay the bills and to treat the kids to kid meals from time to time, we even had enough to put some in savings for the summer. By June, we had enough in savings that we didn’t have to borrow any money from my dad! To this day I can’t figure it out because we really didn’t change our lifestyle and we weren’t making any extra money. Somehow God had stretched what we had to make it enough!

I learned two things from this.. God is my provider, and God is faithful. He made a promise and kept it.

Linda

One day several years ago, I planned to leave work early to take my dogs to a dog park near my home. However, circumstances prevented me from leaving early. When I finally made it home, I let my dogs out to go potty. Usually I’ll clean up the kitchen while the dogs were outside, but on this day I decided to ignore the mess and head straight to the dog park.

As usual, I harnessed my male dog in the car and then had my female load up. As I watched her, I thought she looked kind of odd so I pulled her out of the car and put her back in the yard where she threw up water. This normally would have made me forgo the dog park but this time I just told myself that she had drunk too fast and that she was fine.

I went to put her back in the car and for the first time ever my male dog had wiggled out of his harness. By then I was beginning to wonder if maybe I wasn’t supposed to go to the park that day for some reason. I do believe in signs and normally would have hung up the leashes and NOT gone, but for whatever reason, THIS day I went. I put my male back into his harness, loaded up the female, and drove off.

About a mile from my house, I was sitting at a red light. I happened to glance up into my rear view mirror and saw a large F150 truck with a HUGE bar reinforced grill barreling towards me. Traffic had stopped for a few minutes so the truck should have stopped with no problem. Only it didn’t. I was boxed in with a ditch to my right and oncoming traffic to my left. Nowhere to go. I yelled at my two dogs to sit and braced myself for the impact.

At the moment of impact, I honestly thought my neck was breaking and I prayed to God to protect me. I saw a color flash in the back seat and knew my female dog had been flung into the seat in front of her. Then a jacked up jeep hit the truck causing the truck to hit me a second time. I pushed on the brake pedal as hard as I could but I was still moving forward and I hit the car in front of me.

When my car came to a stop, folks rushed to me and kept telling me not to move. The elderly gentleman in the car in front said he saw my head the steering wheel but I knew that it hadn’t. He kept telling me to be still. He said he and his wife were fine, that they had seen the accident in time to take his foot off the brake so I merely pushed them. There was very minimal damage to their car.

I was afraid to look into the back seat for fear my dogs were injured. I asked how my dogs were. The folks checked on them and, I don’t know how, but they were both FINE! Other than my left arm being numb, which I knew had to be from pinched nerves in my neck, I was OK too.

My husband came and got us, we took the dogs home and went to the ER. The Highway Patrol man who met us in the ER said he didn’t know how I kept my car from damaging the elderly couple’s car in front of me. He said I did a good job at protecting them. I got worried when I noticed the elderly couple at the ER also but when the gentleman saw me and came to check on me, he said they were both fine. They were there just as a precaution because his wife was not well.

All that evening I kept beating myself up. With all the signs, I knew I wasn’t supposed to go to the dog park that day. Why did I ignore them? It was really haunting me because I usually try to pay attention. Any one of the signs I had gotten would have made me not go, yet out of character, I ignored all of them.

After much self-blame and worry, I finally fell into a dead sleep… and was awoken to a very calming voice in my head. “You were EXACTLY where you were supposed to be. That elderly couple’s vehicle would NOT have endured the crash.” INSTANT peace! I knew God had put me in the path of the F150 and Jeep to keep them from hitting the couple’s very old, small car. I was in a BMW 5 series which did EXACTLY what it was designed to do… it absorbed the impact and protected us. Besides a residual nerve issue, I was fine and my pups were fine. If I had not been where I was there was no doubt in my mind that accident scene would have been entirely different. I never questioned it again.

I truly believe God puts us where we’re supposed to be. Sometimes we see the reason, sometimes we just gotta have faith.

Deb

So I created my blog…

and sat down to write  my first God story…

and nothing.  I can’t think of even one story.

Why is it so much easier to remember the bad times, the times we were let down, the times we felt our prayers went unanswered?

Or is that just me and my pessimism?

At one time, I could have won the World Champion Pessimist Award (except something would have probably gone wrong and I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.)

I was convinced that nothing good would ever happen to me. And if by chance something good did accidentally happen, it would soon be discovered and taken away.

I had read Jer. 29:11 for years.  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” It sounded nice, but obviously was written for someone else.

But now I couldn’t even place runner up in any pessimist competition. God has been working in me over the years, slowly replacing the negative thoughts that has plagued me since I was a child with thoughts of hope. A hope that can only be found in Him.

I guess that’s a pretty amazing God story, after all.