The Best Explanation of Tithing I've Ever Heard

January is always tithing month at my old church. While every service included a mini-sermon on tithing "if you don't tithe God can't bless you", a special emphasis is placed on tithing in January. Every single Sunday school lesson, and a few church sermons, are devoted to the topic. Have you ever tried to explain tithing to a Kindergartener? I have. My Kindergarten-aged child still doesn't really know the difference between a dollar and a penny... and we've been counting money nearly every day since October!

If you were having any problems in your life, my old church would ask "do you tithe?" It doesn't matter if your income is $3000 a month and your bills and necessities total $3100 a month, the solution to all your money problems is to tithe.

Every week you'd hear testimonials about how people were in debt and they started tithing, and a year later, they're magically debt-free. I'm sure that their stories are true, the people with the testimonials were trustworthy people. You hear over and over again "everybody can afford to tithe, because it's the FIRST 10% that goes to the Lord."

Okay, that's fine and good, I'm sure that I can give the first 10%. Even on the whopping $1500 we made this month, I could give $150 of that to the Lord. Then you have the mortgage of $1000, and I'm left with $350. My electric bill was $150 this month, so that leaves me with $200 to pay for gas, food, water, sewer, trash, the car payment, etc. It doesn't really work out, does it?

This month is an extreme example, but the $3000 for $3100 in bills is not. I'm sure that God could be a magic money machine that could provide me with an extra $444, every single month, so I can afford to tithe when ends don't meet by normal means, and I'm sure that there are some people out there that have a lot of faith that can make it work... but I'm not one of them. I see the Dave Ramsey budget laid out in front of me and I shake my head and say "it's not going to work."

We were talking about tithing at my new church, which is not something that my new pastor normally talks about. He said that the one time he did try preaching about tithing, someone had a heart attack or something like that, so he took it as a sign that he shouldn't preach any more about tithing, lol. But we had a Sunday school topic on it, so he gave a really good explanation, of what to do when your income doesn't cover, or just barely covers, necessary expenses like food, transportation to get to work and church, your bills, and a place to live?

He said that sometimes people get off the path, and then they want to start doing the right thing, but it's not always something that one can do overnight. Getting to the point where you're living beyond your means is one of those things. Or in our case, we were once living within our means, but our income was slashed, but our bills did not decrease. When we realize that we are living beyond our means, we need to repent of it, and then do whatever we can to get to the point where we can tithe. It would probably be a worse testimony to the Lord if we decided to tithe all of a sudden and stopped paying our mortgage as a result.

Not that we should go out, when we can't afford to tithe, and buy a new set of cookware or some fancy gizmo that we see on television when we can't tithe. We need to do what we can to tithe before we start buying those extras that we don't need.

It makes a lot of sense to me. I know miracles happen... my nephew is having a birthday party on Tuesday, and we really didn't have enough money to buy a gift for him. What do you know, the $25 Target gift card that I won back in November showed up today, so I can get a box of diapers and a present, without spending any money.

Maybe I should believe that God will show up on my doorstep magically with $1500, but unfortunately, I don't.

Religion on the College Campus

I think that Bill O'Reilly has it right when he says that we are in the midst of a culture war. In these days where everybody's lives are so compartmentalized, and it is so easy for us to spend time only with people that are a lot like us, it's hard to tell who is winning. Some companies try to take polls, but those are hard to gauge for accuracy sometimes... statistics can often say crazy things. So most of what you end up with is anecdotal evidence.

I've heard anecdotal evidence about professors who believe in creationism rather than evolution to lose their jobs, grants, fellowships, etc. The same goes for scientists. But rarely does a difference of religion affect my life, other than perhaps a lost friendship or somebody thinking I'm a little silly for my beliefs.

It's hard to tell whether someone's religious views can affect their grades sometimes. I once wrote a paper about pet microchip implants, and its relationship to the prophesied mark of the beast, back in the 90s for a college class (back before most people had heard about pet microchipping) and I didn't get a very good grade on it... but with such a subjective subject as English, it is hard to tell whether I was marked down due to the content of the paper, or whether it was just a lousy paper. On rare occasions, it is obvious that someone's grades are affected by their religion.

Recently, my husband got to experience this. He is currently a college student, and is taking two religion classes. The professor obviously does not share his religious views. My husband studies hard in the classes, and for the most part has done well. However, there is one question on his final exam that he knows will be marked wrong due to his religious beliefs:

True or False: Allah and the God of the Bible are different gods.

Or something like that.

My husband knows the answer that the professor wanted. The professor believes that Allah and Jehovah are the same. However, the answer to this question is strictly a matter of faith. Neither me or my husband believe that Allah is the same God in the Bible... their characters are completely different. The Koran says that Allah claims to have no son... Jesus is the Son of the Biblical God.

My husband answered that Allah and the God of the Bible are different, knowing that the professor would mark it wrong. In fact, he wrote next to the answer "go ahead and mark it wrong." If he were to say what the professor wanted, he would have gotten the question correct, but he would at the same time be denying God himself, equating him with something that he was not.

So my dear husband wasn't thrown to the lions or anything, and that one question probably won't affect his final grade or anything, but it was a small faith litmus test on a college campus. I'm sure that this happens all the time, I had just not seen it so obviously in my own life before.

Have Faith

I was doing some thinking today about recent events in my life. Since things are starting to look up, I can almost look back and think that it's funny. Really, so many bad things have happened recently that it's hard to believe it actually happened:

May
- Dh lost his job
- A few days after our health insurance ended, dd was in the hospital with a 105 degree temperature. Turned out to be an infection that we killed with antibiotics.
- We applied for state assisted health insurance (that we had lost when dh got the job that he just lost)
- Dh got a new job

June
- Haven't been approved for health insurance yet. Ds ends up in the hospital with dehydration and vomiting. He lost more than a pound in 1 day... the doctor had told us a couple of days before that she was worried about his weight and he was in less than the 3rd percentile.
- Get denied for health insurance because we didn't apply for food stamps and unemployment. Nobody in that system can keep up with our changing income, I guess. We reapply because we are still eligible with the new job.

July
- Dd apparently has a UTI. We ply her with cranberry juice as we are waiting for health insurance approval.
- Dd apparently has an ear infection. More cranberry juice.
- The transmission in our car goes out. We can still drive the car on the streets, but not on the freeway.
- The engine in our car goes out. We go get a new car.
- Dh loses new job.

August
- Dh gets new job.
- Dd apparently seems to still have UTI and ear infection. More cranberry juice.
- Dd seems to be suffering from temporary hearing loss due to ear infection. I google it on the internet and it seems that as soon as we can get the infection to go away, her hearing should come back.
- Health insurance approves us for our old income with old job (our rates will go down with new job). They approve dd, me and dh, but not ds. Coverage starts September first, but we can probably get eligibility backdated to pay for our stack of ER bills... at least for dd.

So most everything has been resolved. I'm sure if I bug them enough and call around enough, they will add my ds. I think why he's not covered right now is because he's under a year old so he needs coverage under a different program. I just need to squeak enough until they get him covered. I will be taking dd to urgent care on September 1st to get antibiotics for her ear infection.

This isn't a poor me story, but a story about how great God is. Throughout all of this, he has taken care of us. Not once did our cupboards even go remotely bare. I use The Grocery Game to make up my shopping lists, so we always have plenty of food in our house, even for the couple of weeks in this time period that we didn't have money to shop. We have made our mortgage payments on time, as well as the car payment. The electricity stayed on and so did the water and the sewer. He has been very good taking care of us. For the last few months, there have been some times when I've wondered how God was going to come through, and he always did.

We are all relatively healthy. We are alive and well. I am thankful for that. Of course, some people can not say that. Please continue to pray for Bingomama who lost 2 children and a husband or ex-husband last night in a fire.

God will take care of you if you put your trust in him. He has with us.