June rolled around and that was the month I finished my time as President at St. Paul. And it was also the time when we completely ran out of money!
While our faith was strong, I was expecting a last minute miracle – of money. You know, the business being re-capitalized. Some new income stream coming in. Or just a big check would do! God had clearly had show us to trust him, to believe in what he had called us into no matter what. So we had the faith, but we wanted it to be answered our way – in terms of money. Surely God fixes financial problems with money, right?
But that’s not what happened.
Wow, it was scary. No – harrowing probably better describes it. Call it white-knuckled faith. Bridgette and I had never been in this position before. In 2001, I had cried out to the Lord saying what is going to happen if I get laid off and lose my job? I had never been without a job or income producing business my whole adult life. Instead I went from success and promotion to success. But now, we had nothing left. Everything monetary had been expended or given away. Back in 2001 I really had nothing to worry about, given we had savings, retirement and credit. Now I had neither left (other than credit cards). We had expended our savings and retirement, even our lines of credit. What were we going to do? How were we going to pay the mortgages? The office rent?
For the previous decade, we had operated on a monthly budget of approximately $40,000 cash (after taxes) which is roughly reflective of earning about a million dollar per year. That went first to tithing, then to the mortgages, rent and the various bills, then to expendable income and giving with the rest put away as savings. The first thing that went away was savings, as we then drew down on our savings and investments. My last “paycheck” was from Deutsche Bank in 2002/3. After that it was a draw down situation. My partners quickly left to go back to Wall Street in 2003. My co-founding partner left the business in 2006. So from 2003-2009 everything was funded through savings and retirement. God helped us even with that. Giving me a dream for example about the Euro, which helped us to sell our Euro denominated DB shares at the market peak in 2006.
I had long-ago committed to not try to go back to Wall Street and earn my way out of the problem. God had asked us to step out in faith to become a New Breed trusting in God by the Spirit and to pursue the Storehouse Vision instead of the old hedge fund models.
The confirming signs were there over and over. Like with Rick and Bob in 2007 and 2008. Like with Jen’s yellow boot word. One more confirmation was during All Saints Day 2008. Like also, when my friend and future President of St. Paul Alan Hayes told me that the message he had given that evening at the church as we prayed through the night had been given for me personally and specifically. It was based around a devotional in “God Calling” entitled “Hill of Sacrifice” – the story of Abraham trusting God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. “You must be ready to trust me to the last hour.” The crazy thing was the Holy Spirit had highlighted this very devotional word and prayer to me some weeks earlier for the looming financial crisis we faced.
So now, here we were. An open book to our friends and family around us. But it was not easy, because we made people feel uncomfortable – like I don’t want to be in your position! None the less, we were encouraged by the Lord to share our situation and ask people to pray for us. We made a point of not asking for money or financial assistant because we believed God was going to come through and we didn’t want to place pressure on anyone. Some how. Some way. Not a work of ours or by our own strength. I had lived my life that way up to this point. No more. Trust in Jesus all the way.
One of the first miracles God did with us was providing what i had asked for – a big check. Not quite so big that it covered our expenses mind you, but just enough to get us through to the next month. But to us, it was huge.
One morning checking our bank balance and praying. I felt led to go to the bank and deposit this old 1976 $2 bill I had in my billfold plus the only remaining checks I had to deposit. The $2 was like God was asking me to do a prophetic act. Two biblically means to divide and to multiply – for example when a cell divides in half, it ends up making 2 cells, thus multiplying. I prayed for God’s help. I praised God for his promise to take care of us.
Later on that very evening our church board said to me – You and Bridgette have given so much to the church, we want to give back to you. I was blown away. Totally unexpected. The next day I picked up the check. It was $25,000! We had never been given that large of a gift in our lives. What a miracle of God! Deposit $2 in obedience and we received $25000 from the Lord was how I assessed it at the time (12500x return). Later God showed me that his way of provision is relational and covenantal. One thing he wanted to take out of me was some of the “prosperity gospel” distortions. Like don’t just give to get. God is not an ATM!
Reality hit quickly though. As mentioned, even with that amazing $25k gift, we still were left with $15k of our monthly “needs” remaining. So decisions had to be made. In hindsight, God was using this step down of money to help us prioritize what was important to focus on. To differential between
Our true “needs” are not necessarily money to pay the bills
Sometimes, those kind of “needs” have to be reclassified as “wants.” Including admitting “I want to be in control.” Rather, our true “needs” can be satisfied in a variety of ways, such as receiving gifts and other forms of miracles which do not involve money. For me, it was understanding the desire to preserve my credit, my mortgage payments, etc. was different than having a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear.
One of my regrets later that summer was that much of that $25k gift went to straight to mortgages, rent and insurance rather than to real needs such as food, fuel and essentials.