Be Careful What you pray for....

God just might answer it.

A few months ago, the husband and I were talking about the role of money in our lives and what we wanted it to look like for us specifically. We certainly are blessed with enough; a nice home, two decent cars, nice toys for our kids, food on our table every morning noon and night, new clothes when we need them and lots of little extras just for fun...
so why did that all start to feel like too much ?

We started praying and asking God to give us his heart about money, to help us have the right priorities and we started making some firm financial goals.

We were feeling pretty good in the money department. So, good that we invested in some things we thought would serve us well in the future.

Then recently we sat down to make a solid monthly budget and found it needed to be tighter than we had thought.
No problem.
Undaunted we set out to trim away our excess spending and reign in on the superfluous stuff that gets away on us.

All fine and good, except really recently we were counting out our spending for the month in active and finding we were already over budget in a couple categories....like way over budget.....hmmm. problem.

Before the panic set in and my mental defenses kicked in: "I haven't been spending money? Who's been spending the money?  Who's been stealing our money? Oh ya, I spent it on that... But I NEEDED that..."( and on and on), I felt God saying to my heart,
" Or have I  simply answered your prayers?"

In a Bible study I've been doing this past week, I've been learning a few things about the quality of "gentleness" which translated from the original greek language is "praotes". This word actually describes the attitude of letting God use whatever means necessary to achieve His purpose for you, which is solely to make you  m.ore like Him. Praotes is being able to be calm, patient and trusting NO MATTER WHAT. To be able to say "God is good" when the only thing good is that you're being made more like Him.

You see we like to say that God is love but don't like to think about how God is also tough love sometimes.
He does what's best for us, not always what we want like any loving parent does for their children. The harder road often bears more fruitful results and if the only result is that we lean closer into Him and trust Him with a smile on our face, then that too is the ultimate good.

So, I realized that yes, God has answered our prayers not by giving us more, but by making us content with less.
Early on in our marriage and in the years leading up to it, money was something we had to be very careful and prudent with, but we never felt a lack or any discontent.
I see now, that God is culling us back to that place and in some ways I'm excited about it. Humbled, but excited too.
I see that when my trust is completely in His hands and my finances belong completely to Him, the fun part is up to me. The Challenge for creativity and finding more enjoyment for my family in the non material things and experiences all around us.

In another example of God at work, circumstances around our move to our new home have been up in the air, with some of our carefully laid plans and contingencies falling in around us. While I have my freak out moments of  "Now what are we going to do?" I feel God reassuring me and challenging me, "Will you let me provide for you, in the way that is best, in the way that brings you closer to me rather than closer to your own way of doing things?"

The answer will have to be "yes".

How is God "blessing" you these days?