It’s been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. But I’ve found that when God is involved in your story, he can accelerate those steps in a way that doesn’t make sense at all.
Years ago that was my story. We had a failed business venture that left us in A LOT of debt. It was so much debt that my Dave Ramsey Debt Snowball spreadsheet showed us paying off this debt in 10 to 15 years.
To say that I felt overwhelmed and suffocated was an understatement. We simply did not make enough money to pay this off. And the weight of it, along with the pressure of having a young family was a huge burden to bear. And to add to it, I was an accounting/finance professional, so I felt even more ashamed that we were in this predicament.
How could I let this happen?
But in the middle of this mess, I decided to pray.
And nothing changed…at first.
So I did what my logical mind felt we could do. We took baby steps towards paying off the debt. We squeezed out everything we could from our budget and put what little we could towards the debt. And as we did, something amazing happened.
Somehow through God’s divine provision, we started getting unexpected sums of money in our hands in the form of company bonuses, IRS refunds from a previous year, etc.
At first it didn’t seem real to me. Was this really happening? Was this a dream?
By God’s grace, within one year, the entire debt was paid off.
ONE YEAR.
My spreadsheet said 15 years. But God said “the cattle on a thousand hills is mine” (Psalms 50:10 NLT). He owns EVERYTHING. My debt was no match to His provision.
My story reminds me of the widow and Elisha in 2 Kings 4. The widow of a prophet came to Elisha for help. Her husband had died and creditors were coming and threatening to take her sons as slaves. Elisha simply asked her “Tell me, what do you have in the house?” (2 Kings 4:2 NLT)
Her reply was “Nothing at all, except a flask of olive oil”.
It’s interesting that she really believed she had nothing to offer. But she actually had something. It was small, but it was something.
Elisha instructed her to borrow as many empty jars as she could and to start pouring the oil from her flask into the empty jars she had collected. To her surprise, the oil she had filled up every empty jar to the brim…until she had no more jars to fill. She used the jars of oil to pay off her debts, and used the remaining for her and her sons to live off.
I love this story so much. Even when we think we don’t have anything significant to offer, God can and will always use what we have and do exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think.
In my situation, we didn’t have much to put towards our debt. But God took the little we could give, along with our willingness and consistency to do what we could do, and not only matched, but exceeded our expectations in a beautiful way.
Is there a mountain you are staring at today? I believe there is SOMETHING you have that you can offer in this situation. Do what you can with what you have, and trust that God will step in and blow you away with what He can and will do.
~ Vijoy
Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash
