In the winter of 1999, we hit financial rock bottom. My husband and I met with consumer counseling groups. They said our best option was bankruptcy.
I was pregnant, and we had two small children, ages one and six. We were scared. So we decided to do something extreme—pray! We had prayed in lots of other situations, but for some reason finances had always seemed like more of a personal responsibility. So for the first time, we decided that we would turn our finances over to God, too. As the Bible says, "I am in a great strait: let us fall now into the hand of the Lord." II Sam. 24:14. It doesn't say, "Unless it has to do with money."
Over the course of the next 18 months, we were able to pay off all our credit cards and get our finaces completely under control. It was a long journey, and it wasn't fun. But it turned out to be amazingly rewarding. We wouldn't trade the lessons we learned for the world. Bottom-line lesson? At first we were thinking the challenge was about money, which, of course, it sort of was. But we eventually realized that it was about trusting God.
