This evening Mike and I went for a walk and he started talking about paying taxes and the exchange that Jesus had with His disciples when the tax collectors had challenged them about paying tax. Jesus could have done many things to produce the required fee. He could have told Judas to bring the money bag and taken from there. He could have simply picked one up off the ground that He caused to be there. Instead He said this:
Matthew 17:27
However, we don’t want to offend them, so go down to the lake and throw in a line. Open the mouth of the first fish you catch, and you will find a large silver coin. Take it and pay the tax for both of us.”
Picture from Pinterest
Go down to the lake and throw in a line.
That sounds like work to me.
God often provides for us by bringing us work, no matter how menial it is.
I remember at the end of 2014 when we were blessed with the opportunity to go in with my brother and buy a small cottage on the mountainside in Fish Hoek. It came at an amazingly good price, yet it would still be a stretch for us. After all, Mike was a year away from retirement and the last thing he wanted was to enter retirement with debt. I had been doing a bit of work for the company I work for and “it just so happened” (I always see God’s fingerprints on that phrase), that the company needed me to do a bit more work. It was going to be really menial administrative donkey work that would challenge my eyes. I remember at the time writing to the MD of the company and saying that it would really help me a lot if they could increase my hourly rate. They did. They capped my hours to about 10 per week and every Tuesday and Friday morning, I did the work they needed. It was so boring, but I diligently plugged away at it. It was taking information off their website and putting it onto a variety of other websites. On the way, I put it onto Word and to my horror, I discovered a whole lot of spelling errors that were in the job descriptions. I corrected them and put them on the other websites. I also wrote to the MD asking if she knew about these errors. She didn’t! The people that were doing the job before had never picked up on them. The people that had written the info for the website had made them and never checked. That little episode made me go up a notch or two in her estimation of me. I was building trust.
Months passed. Every Tuesday and Friday I did this painful job. The money made a difference. I was able to pay for the groceries, phone bill and a number of other expenses while Mike paid off the bond. I also knew that one day, one day, I would get an email asking for me to do more than I was doing. You see, I only told the company about the spelling errors. Someone else had to fix them. I was desperate for them to give me the job of fixing them all, but I did not have access to the back-end of their website. I had not risen to that level of trust, but one day I would.
And one day, in about June the email came. They gave me some training and gave me access to their system. They began to trust me.
By the end of 2015, they had raised the cap on my hours and we had paid off our portion of the house. Mike entered retirement in March 2016 with no debt.
What God expects is for us to work.
Nothing we have has come from ourselves. Everything we have has come from God, but He has provided the work for us to get it.
Good reminder.
Also as we were walking, I was reminded of the worry I had prior to the most recent round of interviews. I was worried I would get sick and it would impact me being able to go.
#307 of my 1000 thanks is that I was well before, during and after the interviews.
So grateful.
These are the days!
Keep the smile going!
God bless you!
In His Grip,
Helga đŸ™‚ xx