Memorial Box Monday

I didn't mean to abandon my blog. Truthfully I've abandoned just about everything lately. When your husband is home, things just seem to get thrown off schedule. In a good way!

Today's Memorial Box Monday is about my husband losing his job on Feb. 2, 2010. I suppose it isn't a finished story because I don't know what the ending is going to be.

I want to start out by saying that we are very faithful tithers. After all these years of tithing, though, I still feel like there is a lot to learn. Having said that, I must tell you that God has always provided for us. Never have we been without. Never.

When we were married, I had one small student loan. That was the only debt I carried with me. My husband, having been divorced, had a nice sized child support payment and he was extremely behind on his taxes (he was self-employed.) Since he owned his own business, we never knew when the money was going to come in. I didn't have a set schedule to when my bills were paid. When the money came in, I paid whatever bills had been waiting the longest. Not a good scenario. I was 20 though and not very financially sound. Thinking about this, I was probably more financially sound than most 20 year olds. I'm just guessing.

We liked to go out to eat a lot. I liked to buy new clothes. Nothing in extreme or overly pricey, but money was going out the window fast. Clearly I didn't like the saying, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

Fast foward a few years. I realize that this could be long and drawn-out.

We had accumulated a bunch of credit card debt, a loan, 2 truck payments, and some hefty lawyer bills from an ex-wife who just wouldn't GO AWAY!! We were in over our heads. But the Lord was still showing up. Don't ask me why He chose to still bless us in our financial irresponsibility. But He always made sure we had what we needed. At one point we had attended a seminar based off of a well known financial guru. We both heard the Lord speak to us about our debt and went home that very night to cut up our credit cards. We made a schedule to pay off our debt in 3 years. We were pumped and excited. We knew we could do it.

Then we got more lawyer bills in the mail we weren't expecting. That did it for us. We were deflated. We were defeated. We filed for bankruptcy. I'll never forget going to my pastor's wife sobbing over signing those papers. Bankruptcy is a horrible thing. But again, for some reason, God chose to bless us through our irresponsibility.

Immediately we started to see the hand of God working in our lives. We bought old clunkers with cash. And they lasted. They were good vehicles. We had 3 more cars given to us. FOR FREE! We sold our our house and property and made a huge profit. We should not have sold that house. After 5 years, I doubt that more than 2 houses have sold in our neighborhood since. We used the profit to buy a small mobile home and moved it onto our church property after getting an invitation to do this. We have lived without a house payment for 5 years. We were able to save 20,000 to buy our dream property in the mountains. We have saved even more than that to start building. We had a plan to save for another year and a half and then move to Virginia. We would have more than enough money to build a small, but beautiful house on our land. It was all working out beautifully.

Then my husband lost his job...To Be Continued...