Financial Crisis

Financial crisis? What financial crisis?

Well, like most people, I find that money is always an issue.

My parent’s approach was simple. As missionaries, they had no salary as such, and relied entirely on donations for decades. If things got a bit tight, they would tell God about it and a few days later a cheque would arrive in the post. There was one time when they didn’t have the money for their car tax. They knew a cheque was due, but it was delayed and delayed. Eventually it did arrive, on a day when the exchange rate between £ and the local currency changed. This meant that the value of the cheque increased – by the amount needed for the car tax. Most Christians can tell you this kind of story.

I have a good salary. Civil Engineering is not the most lucrative profession by any means, but I am paid significantly above the national average. But I have a big family, which eats a lots, needs a lot of clothes, goes to sports clubs and friends birthdays, and needs a bigger car for transport, and needs a bigger house to live and sleep in, and where some families manage with one computer we need at least two for them to do their homework. When we committed ourselves to having a big family, the generous child tax credits from the government were not available or even thought of. But God has provided these at just the right time.

I’ve already said in earlier posts that when we were struggling to keep our kids at the private school, God provided a miraculous mortgage at just the right time.

And I’ve already told you that the inheritance for our larger-than-we-could-have-dreamed-for house arrived two days before the deadline.

And so our story has constantly been that at the moment of financial crisis, God has always rescued us. It has got to the point where if we ever receive an unexpected some of money, we don’t spend it because we know that God has foreseen a need that is coming up.

Now the trouble with posting this on the internet is that it will be read by baddies as well as goodies. It is quite possible that some scheming demon will decide to add to my financial pressures. And the truth is, God is not OBLIGED to bail us out all the time. We tend to think of him as the God of the 11th hour – help in the nick of time. But there are many people for whom this has not been the case it it doesn’t have to be for us. God will still be God. There will be times when he comes, not in the 11th hour but in the 13th, when the crisis has struck with full force. There may be a day when our house is repossessed by the mortgage company – it will not undo all the things God has already done for us. Here may come a time when a child falls sick and we pray, but the child dies anyway. God is still God. He doesn’t have to do anything for us. Let us be grateful that in his love he nearly always does, and that in the times when he doesn’t it is only so that he can use the disaster to open the door to new avenues of blessing. All things [including the really bad things] work together for the good of those that love him [even if the bad things are genuinely BAD!!]