Ramblings of a Christian Mom

Funny how people (well, I) tend to avoid doing the things God says we should out of fear. It’s so easy to get lost in the thoughts of “But I need to take care of myself.”

But that’s not really true. God is the one who takes care of us. We just don’t like to give Him the credit. It’s hard to remember though. We live in a very selfish, and self-sufficient society. If something good happens to us, we like to believe it’s due to our own power and ingenuity. But say we get a promotion; who is it that gave us the skills to succeed at work? God!

Lately my husband and I have become very slack at tithing. When I say lately, I mean over the last year or more. Oops. A couple of weeks ago we decided that we would spend our money more wisely. No excess spending, no eating out because we feel like it.

The next Monday, my husband gets offered a promotion at work! What a blessing! We talk it over and decide that even though his hours won’t be as flexible, he should take it.

That night I have a dream that I know God used as a way to get my (our) attention.

In this dream, my husband were in some sort of game room at a mall. I found a ring on the floor, and brought it to the cash. They gave me a voucher of some sort for $25, then their computer recalculated the value and they gave me the difference of it’s value in another voucher to add up to $2500. My husband was just about the pick them up when some sort of commotion happened and he ran off. I grabbed the vouchers and tried to find him.

As we wandered around, we realized that someone else wanted the money we’d been given for the ring; it had been his ring. I told them my husband had left the vouchers behind but didn’t share the fact that I had them. As we walked around and kept trying to avoid the other man, we realized our possessions were vanishing; eventually even our car. When we finally gave up the vouchers, all of our things were returned to us. That’s when I woke up.

I told my husband about the dream the next morning and he came to the same message that I had; we need to start tithing.

We’ve been trying so hard to get rid of debt, putting off tithing “til later, when taxes come in”, that we somehow made it OK for us to ignore God’s word. But this was clearly a message; well, a warning, that God didn’t agree with us. Like in the dream, we’d been getting a certain amount of money, that had suddenly been promised to increase. But now it was time to smarten up.

We need to remember that it’s God money; He is giving it to us in order to provide for ourselves and our family, but also in order to further God’s kingdom with. And He can just as easily take it away again if we don’t use it the way He told us to.

So last week we tithed for the first time in a long time. And go figure, the very next day, we get the exact same amount, from something else, totally out of the blue. God will take care of us! Money isn’t everything. We need to remember that God sees the Big Picture while we only see the speck that’s in front of us. God loves us. He’ll take care of us.

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