Inspirations

Tonight, I’m doing something I absolutely hate.  My husband and I are working on a budget.  I imagine that most of you feel the same way. It’ kind of like taxes and doctors, we dislike them and breathe a sigh of relief when they are done. Truth be told; we really don’t enjoy working on a budget at all.  Yet it is one of the necessary components in knowing exactly how much you have and what you can spend. If indeed we are responsible to God for how we handle the resources that God has given us, then we need a clear picture. One piece of the puzzle that can bring the whole puzzle into focus is a budget.  It allows you to see and compare what you spend with what you have.  Sometimes as I’ve done a budget and looked at what I saw, I could see that the problem was little things that add up.  I realized that the problem was that I forgot the advice I had been given long ago, little things add up.  As we do a budget, we often see little things th...

I was in a store ready to check out; there they were candy bars just waiting for me to take them home.  Why do they even put them at the checkout! Well, the store knows that almost everyone has a tendency to "impulse" buy.  In fact,  some stores set a place aside for the things they think you will pick while you are looking for other things.  The problem with this type of buying is that we forget that little things add up.  We may pop it in the cart and think, "it's just $5"; what we forget is that if we add even a couple of things, we could easily spend $25 quickly.  Then we look back and think, "where did that money go."  Who among us has not walked into a store with the idea that we were only going to buy a couple of items only to find that we have actually bought way more than the "couple of things".  In my case,  they are often things that I want, more than things I need.   I get deceived because they don't cost much, so it's oka...

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? Some time ago, we had a van.  We used it for many purposes, and it served us well.  However, at some point it wore out (most things do), and we had to dispose of it.  As we were cleaning out the van, as in cleaning out all the debris; we had four young children. I found out there were some things that the van could do that I never knew.  I was completely amazed. I have thought about it much since then.  It has always served to remind me to pay attention to what you have. I had no idea of some of the things that the van could do, so I never used it to it's fullest.  What I learned is that to make full use of something I have to be aware of what it is capable of.  The same is true of our finances, in order for me to make the best use of and honor God with my finances; I have to know what I have in t...

One of the most common pitfalls, concerning finances, in our society today is living beyond our means; to put it simply spending more than you make. Our society with all its technology and “things” make it easy to spend money we don’t really have, plus we are inundated with commercials making sure we know what we can buy. Most of us, me included, have at one time or another fallen into this trap. We see a new gadget and rather than pay the bills; we want to buy that new “toy”. Most of the time is a problem of pride. We don’t want our neighbors and friends to know that we can’t afford everything that they can, and we don’t want to admit that they may be doing better financially than us. So we purchase a house way more expensive that we can afford, or we buy a “high end” smartphone simply because everyone else has one. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have any of these things a nice house, a new car, or even a smart phone or computer if you can afford them. The problem...

Bring the whole  tithe  into the  storehouse , that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the  Lord  Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. Over the next few blogs I am going to be honest about finances, not because I think I am doing everything  right but because I know that over the years I have done many things wrong and had to learn these lessons the hard way and many of them I'm still learning.  Perhaps we can learn some lessons together. I would like to begin by suggesting that, as a Christian, we give to God first then take care of necessities.   This one thing can make a world of difference. We often want to give after we have taken care of everything else. When we were first married, we fell into this trap.  I can tell you we never had enough, and it was hard to give to God....

You,  God , are my  God , earnestly I  seek  you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. My dad had a dog named Tipper.  This was definitely my dad’s dog.  He would follow my dad anywhere.  We lived on a farm; if my dad went out to fix the fence the dog would follow him.    At night, the dog would wait for my dad to sit down and then come and sit right beside him in the chair.  This dog was not a small dog, and yet he had to share the chair with my dad.  If we were eating, the dog would come and lay right at the table beside him. There were very few times that you would see my dad and the dog was not close by.   Tipper liked all of us, but he loved my dad.  He loved him so much that he wanted to be close to him.  He wasn't content to sit and wait for my dad.  He had to be wherever my dad was.  We had chickens that we h...

because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful.  Mercy triumphs over judgment. A few weeks ago I walked into a local fast food place hoping for a quick meal.  As I entered, there were few customers, so I was in luck, or so I thought. The people behind the counter looked up saw me waiting; even acknowledged me and went on with their work.  After waiting eons longer for someone to wait on me, God reminded me of a verse in James “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”. I decided to change my lunch plans.  As I left, I was quite annoyed and hurt.  After all, they should have waited on me.  Is that any way to run a business?  I was still a little “put out” about the situation when I got back home.  I decided that I should let the manager know what happened.  It was only reasonable to expect prompt service and the employees completely ignored me.  Who would ...