Money or Not...Here We Come. (Part 2)

   Now on to step 2....We are not good at asking for help, we are more comfortable giving than receiving.  In fact I have cheated people close to me out of blessings because I wouldn't accept their generosity.  There's one particular time that happened ten or so years ago that still bothers me.  Well we needed to have a fund raiser and I only felt comfortable having a garage sale and asking for donated items.  I mean after all there's a lot of people who would rather take stuff to the free store than sell it so basically it was no skin off their back to help us.  That's how I rationalized it in my head anyway.  We had a lot of wonderful people donate items!  We even had a gentleman in our church give us a hundred dollar check!  That was huge for us!  Nobody before or since has just given us that much money!  Around that time we sold our house (it had been for sale for 2 years).  We had to move the weekend after our garage sale.  So, we had to get rid of everything that weekend and probably let some things go cheaper than we should have.  We still did good though!  We made almost 1,300 dollars!  It gave us the jump start we needed in our savings account!

  In the next year we built a new house and saved every dime of money possible.  We also applied for a grant which we were denied.  That was hard because it made me question if we were really doing what God wanted us to do.  But we kept pressing on knowing that God had gotten us this far.

  In July when my summer checks came we reached our goal!  We had just over 11,000 dollars in our savings acct.!  WOW!  God had blessed us so much!  There was one thing I didn't account for though.  I had forgotten that I needed 300 dollars for our homestudy update in August.  So out it came from the savings.  I also ran us too short and had to take out 175 dollars for grocery's and gas for my car.  I was so disappointed because that's the first time I had to withdraw any money that wasn't for the adoption.

  So, September 6 rolls around and we finally got the call we had been waiting for!  We got a referral of a 13 month old healthy girl!  I was excited beyond belief but quickly thought "Oh, No! We are short on money!"  We were 540 dollars short to be exact.  We needed 11,090 dollars to send with our acceptance paperwork.  So, here's where the story gets good...Jason and I were discussing where and how we were going to come up with the money.  We thought about asking someone to borrow it or getting cash off our credit card.  Neither one of those choices felt right.  God had gotten us this close he wasn't going to leave us hanging 540 dollars short!  Not after a year of saving over 10,000 dollars!  But where was it going to come from?!  This was a Monday and I had written out my bills on Friday but still had not found the time to pay them.  I realized they totaled 300 dollars and they weren't due until the 20th which was the same day I got my first paycheck of the school year!  So thank God I hadn't paid them!  I could hold them and pay them on the 20th when I got paid and they wouldn't even be late!  So, between holding our bills, 60 dollars cash my Aunt and mom had raised for us, cash out of Jason's wallet and some money from our checking acct. we had enough!!!!  Did we have any extra?!  Absolutely NOT!  But we met our goal, our bills weren't late, we had grocery's and gas in our car!  Glory to God!  God never promised us extra or excess but he promised to give us what we need and he did exactly that and we were thankful!