A Real Life Miracle

My mom always says that the Lord's math is different than our math.  It's an interesting concept to me particularly, because I LOVE math.  I have always been very good at math and enjoy doing it.  Well, needless to say, I keep VERY meticulous track of our finances.  I created an excell spreadsheet that helps me balance my finances and into which I enter every single purchase we make and all money we put into our bank account as well as any interest earned.  It allows me to daily keep track of how much money we have available at any given moment.  It allows me to easily see how much I spend on groceries or utilities or insurance or whatever category I may be interested in.  It automatically deducts money to be put into savings so that I don't spend that money.  It really just makes my life easier and helps us keep a budget, avoid debt, and build savings.  Well, one of the most useful things my program does is that it allows me to easily see how much we have spent and how much we have earned in any given month.  I can also find the average daily balance for any given period of time.

Well, this last year has been very trying financially for us.  Despite our frugality, our expenses have been heavy.  Right after having our third baby at Christmastime, we gave up a secure job with good pay, despite the uncertain real estate market, and moved our family to a different state, taking a new job with a $15,000 paycut.  Why did we do this?  Well, we decided that quality of life is more important than money.  It was a huge leap of faith.  The new job offers a far better work environment and we have been much happier as a result.  But, having moved so quickly, and in such difficult economic times, we have been unable to sell our house.  It has sat on the market for a year now.  On our old salary, we were easily able to make our mortgage payment, but, on our current lower salary, covering our high mortgage payment as well as the costs of running both homes has been leaving us strapped for cash.

While doing our taxes this year, I took an in depth look at both our expenses and our income throughout this past year, and what did I discover?  The Lord's math is different than our math.  We have witnessed a true miracle.  For 9 of the past 13 months, our expenses have exceeded our income, totaling $1272.01 of excess expenses over the past year.  We have just barely maintained an average daily balance of $8 throughout the last year, and on many months, the average daily balance has been a negative number.  In fact, in January of last year, our average daily balance was $-6.96.  That means we started the year off in the hole.  And yet, although we started the year out in the hole and have spent $1272.01 more than we have earned, we have somehow not run out of money!

We have been able to meet all of our financial obligations and have not defaulted on our mortgage or education loan payments.  Even more, we have been able to maintain the $1000 minimum balance in our bank account to avoid excess fees!  And to top it off, we were somehow able to contribute and extra $251.10 to our education loans this month.  That totals a real life $2530.07 miracle!  Really it's worth even more than that, as we have not had to declare bankruptcy, we have not lost our home to foreclosure, we have not even had to short sale our home!  When you consider the value of the home, you could perhaps even call this a $315,000 miracle or even simply a miracle of personal credit and integrity.

I have a testimony of tithing.  We have always, even throughout this past year, payed a full 10% tithe plus an additional fast offering each month and donated to the humanitarian fund for Haiti relief.  I believe that this $2530.07 miracle is a direct result of our contributions.  With this kind of blessing, who can afford NOT to pay tithing and share with those less fortunate?  Miracles DO happen and today I am grateful that the Lord's math is different than our math.