God is So Good

God is so good to our family. It is amazing how that whenever we become involved in "God's activity" that He gets involved in "our activity." In the past I've been guilty of pursuing things that were temporal... you know things like buying the newest electronic gadget, a newer car, clothes, shoes (no, I'm not gay! I just like shoes.), a bigger house... and it seemed like I was never satisfied. It seemed like we never had enough money to get the "thing" that was finally going to give us that feeling of contentment. But over the last 2 years as we've shifted our focus away from "us" to "others" we have more money. I can't explain it. When MJ and I began our journey to adopt 5 orphans from Brazil a little over a year ago, we didn't have the $40,000 that we needed to adopt them... but God provided all of the money we needed. Over the last year I haven't received a raise in my church salary (and no, I'm not complaining... I'm very thankful for my job.) and I've increased the number of people in our family by 5... but we have more money in our bank account today than before we adopted. As a matter of fact, when we received our giving records in January... we gave more in 08' than in 07'. So how does that happen? MJ and I were also able to have the money to pay for our mission trip a few weeks ago in cash ($2,500) without having to put it on a credit card. And it has nothing to do with us. We've been married for 20 years and most of the time we've lived paycheck to paycheck... always a month behind on our bills. But not now! God has supernaturally worked a miracle in our finances. And I believe the reason is this... we don't care about the temporal any more. We are focused on the eternal. Now I'm not saying that new clothes and houses don't appeal to us. But what I am saying is that we're not pursuing them anymore. I guess when Jesus told us that "if we would seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, that all of these things would be added to us" that it was true!? Here's another example; today our oldest son, Michael, boarded a plane for Nicaragua. He'll be there for the next two weeks helping to feed thousands of children with Samaritans International. I don't know if you remember, but a few weeks ago in an earlier post, I made the comment that I thought everyone should have their teenagers go on a missions trip (and every adult as well) at least once. I said that I thought it would change their perspective on life... do you remember that? Well anyway, when MJ and I got home from Brazil a few weeks ago we heard that a friend of the family (Perry Brown, President of Samaritans International) was going on a mission trip to Nicaragua where he has a feeding program that feeds over 21,000 destitute children in a rural part of the country. We asked Michael if he would be interested in going if Perry had room on the trip, and he said, "yes." So we called Perry and he told us that if we would pay for the plane ticket he would take care of all the other expenses. Well we just so happened to have the money (a little over $400) to cover the ticket. This is huge because normally we wouldn't have that much money left over after we paid bills but this time we did. God is so good! So my question for you is this... what are your pursuits? What is that thing that you are striving for? Is it an eternal thing or a temporal thing? If it's a temporal thing then you're probably on your own... but if it's an eternal thing... keep pressing on and just watch how God gets involved to bring it to pass.

See ya, Jim