Blessings

I know this post may annoy people or cause them to roll their eyes, but I feel the need to post about it anyways!  So here goes...

While growing up my parents always told me I needed to give some money to the church, and I did, but not faithfully.  When I got married, Kevin and I disagreed about how much money to give to the church.  To not cause an argument, we'd just give about $20 every week.  About the time I had Hayden, our church did a series on Financial Freedom and we read through the book ABC's of Financial Freedom.  It is a wonderful book!  I knew the only way to get Kevin on the same page was for him to read the book too.  After he read it, there were no arguments, and we both agreed we needed to give at least 10% of our income back to the church.

All the people that say, "That's not possible to do these days" or, "I work too hard for my money to just give it away" well, I disagree.  Here's a true story.  When we made our 1st budget after reading this book, the first thing I did was take 10% of our income out for the church, then gas and food, then bills and so on.  When we got towards the end of the week, I realized Hayden would need more diapers before the week was over and I had no money for them.  That night Kevin's mom stopped by to see Hayden and had in hand a box of diapers she just picked up.  The next morning my mom came by and had a box of diapers for Hayden too.  I had asked no one for diapers.  No one, not even Kevin (I didn't want him to think our budget failed the first week!) knew I was freaking out about coming up with the money for diapers, but God provided for us.

If you take God's money out of your check every week before it can get spent on non-sense (extra trips to Walmart, a fast food meal, a quick trip to Starbucks, etc), I know you'll be blessed.  In fact, that's what the bible promises.  Click here for more bible truths about money. 
Deuteronomy 15:10
You shall generously give to him, and your heart shall not be grieved when you give to him, because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all your undertakings.

Here's another story.  That same year we started tithing, we talked about what we were going to do with our tax refund check.  Anticipating a big return, we planned on paying off one of our debts that was about $5000.  Our refund was, lets just say, not what we were expecting!  We still planned to tithe 10% of the money we were to get back, then learned Kevin was going to get a nice bonus that year.  It got us to about $4400 to pay towards our debt.  Days later I got a check in the mail from our mortgage company.  It had a letter attached saying something about them over charging us and guess what the amount was we got back.  Yea, about $700, so once we tithed out of that, we were able to pay off our debt. Stuff like that doesn't just happen!

We've been faithful in doing what God asked us to do, and he's continued to bless our socks off.  Our house and how we acquired it is another story of being blessed.  Allie's ears being "perfect", my kidney stone surgery being cancelled, Kevin calling last night to tell me about another "bonus" check we'll get this year, I could go on and on with examples.  In fact, I've decided to start a "blessings" journal to record all the things God has blessed us with.

Let me remind you, we are a single income family.  Money is always tight.  It's just forced us to look outside the box and see where we can save money.  It has also made us reprioritize and see what "extras" we could could cut out.  If you feel like you can't get ahead, or other people around you are being blessed but you aren't, try the tithe!