Our Testimony

Every member of the campaign committee at my church was asked to write a stewardship testimony of what God had done during the first half of our church campaign which has been going on for 2 years.

I was asked to share this testimony in a campaign newsletter, and then I was asked to share it with the congregation on Sunday, January 9. So I thought I would share it on the blog as well. It really is amazing what God did in our lives during the first campaign:

Luke and I were married in July of 2008, just a few months before the first building campaign began.

Being newlyweds, we were still getting a handle on our budget, and unfortunately we had not yet begun tithing. In the fall when we started hearing about the building campaign, we knew we needed to start since it is what God asks of us.

The more we heard about the campaign, the more we realized that God was asking us to give beyond 10% of our income. We realized that giving to the Lord is not something that we should do out of duty or just because the Bible says we should; instead, it should be something we do out of faith and love for the Lord. After all, the Lord tells us to test Him and see that He will always be faithful to provide for us. Two years ago at the beginning of our marriage, we looked at this new adventure as a chance to see what God would do. We just knew that the Lord would blow us away in the next few years!

When we first set our pledge in 2008, we were in the process of buying our house. There were a lot of details to iron out, and it was a stressful time! Just a few weeks after we decided to let God have control of our finances though, our situation worked out perfectly, and God’s fingerprints were all over it!

First of all, we were told that we had to paint our new home before we could close on the loan. We had no idea how we were going to do that quickly! However, God did not let us down. Our family and friends came in droves to help us paint on two Saturdays in October. It took us just two weeks to completely paint every inch of the exterior of our house! We did not do that. God did that!

Next, for various reasons, we were breaking our apartment lease in order to buy our house. Because of that, we were going to be responsible for paying the rent for that apartment every month until it was rented out, along with making our mortgage payments! God showed up in a big way here, and we found a new renter for the apartment a whole week before we even closed on the house!

This quick answer to prayers caused a whole new set of needs: we had exactly one week to be out of our apartment, and our new house was not ready to be lived in yet, because we were renovating it. We had absolutely no idea what we were going to do! But God did…

Immediately our families and friends came again to help us finish the renovations in our house. On top of that, Luke’s grandparents, who were staying in Arizona at the time, let us stay in their beautiful home for two weeks while we finished renovations! His grandparents also have a large garage, where we could store a lot of our big furniture pieces until our house was ready.

We ended up staying there for two weeks while the house was being completed. Commitment Sunday happened during those two weeks, and Luke and I both felt so cared for that day because God had smoothed out everything for us. Our God is a God of details!

The best part about God blessing us with our new home is that it is actually a triplex, containing three apartments. We are able to live in one, and rent out the other two. Because we trusted God with our finances, He blessed us with the opportunity to give even more money through the rent for those apartments.

During the past two years since the campaign began, we have had rough financial times. We’ve had innumerable, expensive car problems and other things that caught us off-guard. But somehow, when we gave Him our first fruits and kept our trust in Him, he has figured out the math so that we always have enough, and then some, by the end of the month.

Sometimes we can’t see the solution to our problems; however, God will work out any situation for His glory, and He will do it in a way that is so much better than what we could have planned for ourselves!

We feel so blessed to have learned this lesson in faith during our first few years of marriage, and we can’t wait to see what God has in store for the next campaign! I hope He can stretch our faith even further this time!