The Faith of a child

The Faith of a Child

I have worked with children most of my adult life. I love kids and have learned so much about God working with them. God tells us,

"I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." Mark 10:15

Well, you'd think that I would have this concept down pat, since I see every day just what God is talking about. Kids think, "God said it so I'll do it" and not over-intellectualize every command of God. They don't worry about where their food is coming from or if they will have clothes. They simply trust. There is not the
"but what about..." that we adults allow to clutter or thinking and ruin our faith.

Until this summer we will be living on less money than normal due to UGA making its employees take one furlough day a month for 6 months to cut the budget. This has been totally stressing me out because we needed all our pay to make our budget work. I felt like I was already cutting, scrimping and be as frugel as I could before these cuts. I literally stressed and wigged for the entire month prior to the first pay cut. Then I dived into that months grocery shopping and what did I learn by the month's end? Well, duh! God came through and helped us more than we could have immagined! We had money left over!

Well, I did it again. I stressed because Thanksgiving and Christmas take more money than normal months. I was stressing because the heating bill rose this month. Then Sunday God spoke through Pastor Mel and I was convicted by my total lack of faith. Did I learn nothing from the kids I so love to work with? So I repented. Monday we had more unexpected expenses with illness. My entire family has had to get on antibiotics for walking pneumonia/bronchitis. I stressed again, but as I started to stress I felt convicted and repented. God gave me peace.

He is in control and knows my situation, and even knows how to provide for all we need. I know that and I have to believe that over what I see in my circumstances. God is much more real that what looks real in this life and He loves me and will provide everything we need. God is so good! how can I doubt? It saddens me to think I hurt God by my doubting.

Well, no more! I am determined to keep on trying to learn this lesson until I really do have the faith of a child!

Don't worry...be happy!

"An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up."

                                    ~Proverbs 12:25

My hubby works for UGA, and recently the state decided that their employees must take 6 days off without pay to offset their lack of funds. Since I do not bring in any money, we live very simply. We can pay our bills and grocery shop, and we take the kids to Burger King every once in a while. But we never have any money left over to save for future needs. We are OK with that, God has always provided. But with this new pay cut our budget is slashed by a whole $150.00 for the next 7 months. That's a lot for us. I was the epitome of the scripture quoted above. I couldn't sleep, as my brain wouldn't rest. I kept thinking of ways to save money to deal with this budget cut. I know God provides but I also know I have to do my "job" and manage what He gives us well.  So needless to say I was weighed down for quite a while.

But then one day kind words cheered me up just like the scripture says. I had kind words from friends - even friends that had no job for quite a while! They could have told me that I need to buck up and get a hold of myself, that having no job was far worse. but they did not. They empathized and offered me kind words of encouragement. What a comfort that was!

Then God provided free dog food from a friend. That was the first sign from God to tell me that HE sees our situation and provides. We went grocery shopping and got far more for the slashed budget than I would have dreamed! Another friend just passed clothes to us for the boys. Another provision from God! I can't wait to see what God continues to do, but one thing I know - HE WILL PROVIDE!

God Provides!

God is so good! I just have to share what He has done! I think I shared a few posts ago that we owe quite a bit in student loans from college, and have delayed paying them all these years because we can't afford it. We had just been informed a few weeks ago that our forbearance opportunities are over and we would have to pay nearly $200 each month in payments. We DEFINITELY didn't have that in the budget and we would have to eat lots of beans and cornbread to afford it. Darin was even looking at getting a second job.

Well, or first encouragement from God was that Darin gets some money from the navy each month he takes a college class. He has been working on his master's degree. That money was just increased, and got us within about $30.00 of the loan payment. That is doable!

Well....God didn't stop there!!!!!

I have had to have several conversations with the loan company to straighten things out with them, hours worth in fact. I won't go into the problems, but they were crazy, let's put it that way. I had to muster all the patience I could and ask God for mere. Finally they let me speak to a supervisor that not only ironed out the problems, but told us we can have 60 more months of forbearance! That means if we can't afford the payments, we have 5 more years! Now we have time to plan and save what we can in preparation. I also believe God will provide between now and then.

What a great surprise!!!!!

God is good and HE PROVIDES!

No matter who wins this election please never forget that God is in control and it is in GOD we trust not in Presidents.

God's Provision

God has done it yet again! He has provided us with a second vehicle, and boy what timing! I really need a vehicle this week. The neat thing about this is that in college Darin wanted a Chevy Blazer, and this is what God provided. And the year of this truck is about the year Darin would have gotten in college. Darin is so tickled with the fact that it is a blazer, so it is such a blessing that God not only provides for our needs, but He even picked out a vehicle that would really bless my hubby! Now when we go camping we will have room to store our stuff. You should have seen us traveling to Jekyll Island this year to camp. The poor kids were covered in massive piles of stuff that wouldn't fit in the trunk. We can also fit home improvement items in this blazer which is timely because we are replacing windows and we will be putting in a laminate floor. God is so good and I am so thankful to Him for loving us so much!

God's Goodness

Forgive me if today's writings are lengthy, I have a lot to share and work through. Writing helps me process things.

Last Wednesday night we were driving home in the '85 Cutlass Ciera that we just got back up and running. It started coughing more and more, the closer we got to our house. It cut off once or twice, then started making a loud scraping sort of noise. We barely made it home, but we did make it home. We have a mechanic right in our neighborhood, just one mile from our house so we used our other car to push it to the mechanic. Yesterday he declared it beyond repair as the problem seems to be the crankshaft, bearings and many other really bad sounding things.

The really neat thing is that yesterday morning when I was doing my devotional, it was so tailored to me and what is going on with my life that I knew God arranged for me to read that devotional for precisely that time.

I have been dealing with health problems for a few weeks now that leave me very tired and acting like I have PMS to the extreme. It literally has been hard to keep up with all I have to do on a day to day basis. I don't even think straight any more and feel like I'm not even good at grocery shopping. We live 30 minutes from town, so having one car is very challenging. I have to drive my hubby to work and pick him up after work if I am to have a car, which means two hours traveling in the car. We also have to get our homeschooling done as well. I have two appointments next week so right away I need to face that challenge head on. So needless to say, I needed encouragement yesterday, and God gave it to me BEFORE we got the final word to put the car to rest. Let me share what the devotional said in a nutshell:

TP from Heaven

"My God will liberally supply (fill to the full) your every need according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:19 AMP

The story in the devotional talked about a preacher's wife who was suffering severe health problems that left her weak, lethargic, and drained of all her strength. She was a nurse and her husband a preacher. Her husband felt it was time to leave the church he was pastoring during this time, so she had to work two nursing jobs to support them when she didn't even have the energy or strength to work one job. One Friday she needed toilet paper but didn't have the money to buy any so she asked God to stretch the half roll they had left. The next day she found a full roll of toilet paper in the mail box, sent as a sample. She asked everyone on her mail route if they also got a full roll of toilet paper and no one else did except one other preacher's wife. It really ministered to her that God not only had a sense of humor, but He cared about even the little things like toilet paper.

"Let Him have all your worries and cares, for He is always thinking about you and watching everything that concerns you." 1 Peter 5:7 TLB

So obviously God knew ahead of time the car was going to die, and he knew I would be concerned so He talked to me through this story. How cool is that!

Later on that day as we were driving home from shopping, I was looking out of the car window and someone in the car next to us was dressed as a disgusting, realistic-looking looking scary thing. He turned to look right at me to see if I would jump and scream, I guess, which I didn't. HA! Now I am an adult so I know I have to deal with Halloween and am big enough to ignore this stuff. But at night when I was trying to sleep I was attacked with all the worrying about how will I get the boys to basketball practices when they will be in two different places in the county, how will I.... how will I... (you get the picture). If that wasn't bad enough I had a bad dream that scared me. I can't remember the last time that happened. But here is the cool thing about it - first of all I was so scared, I almost asked my husband to go to the bathroom with me, but I didn't. I just sang Jesus name over and over until I was back in the bed. The dream kept wanting to reply in my head, and I wanted to stop it to enable me to go back to sleep. But then God made it clear to me that it wasn't a bad dream at all. The dream was of my family and I in a van with people that looked like my grandparents. The grandmother look alike person then pulled a gun on me and was then somehow chasing me. (Don't know how we got out of the van.) I ran to a house with familiar people who were right there by the sliding glass door so I was able to open the door and they could pull me in to safety. The grandmother person grabbed my heel as I was being puled but I was still pulled to safety. What was so scary was I awoke at that moment and thought I could feel my heel being grabbed. In the dream I was even more scared at what would happen to my family in the van. Well when God revealed what the dream really was I realized that the Grandmother person wasn't shooting at me. She tried but the bullets wouldn't come out so she was throwing them at me. Of course that couldn't hurt me. So try as he may, the enemy can't hurt me. He protects and provides and even the bullets couldn't hurt me.

God is so good and He is so personal. I know He understands my situation and has answers for every problem. Please help me pray for understanding, wisdom and the grace to trust God like never before. Thanks for your patience today!