It’s easy to trust in God when things are going great. It’s also easy to tell people they should just trust in God when things are going bad. But, be real here, can you trust God when you’re broke?
I came to realize not all that long ago, that as long as my bills were paid, I was sort of indifferent to God. Being raised in the church, I know the Bible stories, I know a lot of theology, I go to church almost every Sunday, but it’s still easy for the earthly stuff to get you down.
A few years ago, I spent a lot of time with someone who was a slave to their money. As much as they did all the right Christian things, I felt that they might have had a bit of an idolatry problem when it came to finances. Everything decision they made was coloured by whether or not it would help them obtain more money. After all, in Matthew 6:24 when Jesus is preaching His sermon on the mount, He says you can’t serve two masters. As for myself, I don’t want to sound hypocritical by saying this, but I don’t feel I’ve ever truly loved money. I like it, I mean, who doesn’t. But I don’t love it.
At the same time, it’s only been recently, that I’ve been able to really embrace the fact that my money is God’s, therefore, if I have it, that’s great, but if I don’t, that’s ok too. If everything I own is God’s, then that includes my expenses too.
This doesn’t mean I can be a bad steward with my money, it’s just amazing the perspective change you get when you start viewing everything (well, most everything, I’m still human you know), in light of eternity. If every item you own is God’s, you no longer have to stress over the state of it.
A prime example is a few months ago when several of my rabbits got sick. I mean, really sick. Vet attention really didn’t do anything. It originally started with a few of my commercial breeding does. I isolated them, gave them the prescribed medication, and otherwise did what should’ve been the right thing. Somehow, be it a biosecurity breech on my part, or some other cause, Eric, Twizzler, and Corban also got sick. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my commercial does, but these three are some of my top rabbits. Corban is by far my fastest, highest hopper, and Eric and Twizzler are a rare variety I worked very hard to get. I was kinda devastated, because at this point, I had already made the difficult decision to cull some of the commercial does in hopes of stopping the disease spread. I was down good rabbits already, and didn’t want to have to cull out any additional rabbits, much less my best ones. At one point, I was down in the barn, looking at Eric and thinking of how hard I had worked to get him. It was a lightbulb thing where I suddenly realized that these rabbits were all made by God, and God was ultimately responsible for them. I was able to pray for healing for the rabbits. With prayer, and an adjustment to the medication, I think it’s safe to say that the rabbits are better. Praise God!
It’s a situation that would seem trivial to many, but rabbits are a big part of my life. When I was able to recognize them as property of God, that He lets me take care of, it makes a huge difference on my perspective. After all, our Heavenly Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10) . We should be grateful that He gives us the opportunity to take care of some of those cattle. And we should be assured that if He sees every sparrow fall, He truly cares about us and our specific needs. (Matthew 6: 25-34)