When I got home from GoWeek last Friday night, I felt relatively good. Tired of course, from a week of waking up early and brain-stretching training and the flight home, but also good. It had been a good week of meeting people and learning how to raise money so that I could follow God's calling in Berlin for the next two years. Despite the fears and inner conflicts that had occasionally sprung up during GoWeek, I was feeling good, confident that God would provide.
I was sitting in the comfortable chair in the living room, watching Orioles baseball, when I opened my ReachGlobal email account. Inside it was an email from my MPD coach with an updated budget, which details how much money I will need per month while I am in Berlin, as well as startup costs. At GoWeek I had been handed a budget that estimated about $2100 a month, with $16,000 in startup costs. This comes out to about $66,000. Quite the chunk of change. But I had gotten used to this number. Really, I hadn't thought about it too much. I said to myself, "Just think of it as $2,000 a month. Just think about raising that. And then an additional $16,000 on top." It was easier to think about the $16,000 as the little cherry on top of the world's most unpleasant ice cream sundae. I had already decided to focus on the relational aspect of ministry partnership development, letting people know what I am going to be doing and how exciting it is, and being able to share in that with them. It was easier to just focus on that and think of the $2,000 a month only occasionally, or to think of it as the very obtainable goal that it is.
My new budget said that I would need $3,130 a week, with still around $16,000 in startup costs. This comes out to around $91,000. Now, I had expected my budget to increase. My MPD coach and I had discussed that I would need new insurance, which was good but certainly not cheap. And my monthly student loan payments would need to be added in. So I was expecting it to go up. But I was still quite shocked by how much it had grown.
By the following afternoon, I was afraid. And not just a little afraid, but very afraid. Not the kind of fear you feel when Jason Voorhees is bearing down on you, but more like the fear you get when you have 10 hours worth of research paper to write, and only 5 hours to do it. The axe is slowly bearing down on your neck. There was no way I could raise that much money in the roughly ten weeks that I have, I felt. I couldn't shake the fear for much of that day. Thankfully, I did what I hoped would become a daily routine of prayer and reading the Bible. Granted, that has been my hope for a long time, with only modest sucess. I started with the daily reading from Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost For His Highest." Whenever I open that book or the Bible, there is usually a silent, nearly unnoticeable expectation in my mind that God is going to give me exactly what I need at that time. Usually I dismiss it immediately, or don't notice it at all. And usually I don't feel like I was rewarded. Sometimes the reading is good, but not necessarily what I feel like I need at the time. Sometimes things do stick better after some time as passed.
Here is the reading for May 23rd from "My Utmost for His Highest:"
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Our Careful Unbelief
05/23/2014
. . . do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on —Matthew 6:25
Jesus summed up commonsense carefulness in the life of a disciple as unbelief. If we have received the Spirit of God, He will squeeze right through our lives, as if to ask, “Now where do I come into this relationship, this vacation you have planned, or these new books you want to read?” And He always presses the point until we learn to make Him our first consideration. Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion.
“. . . do not worry about your life . . . .” Don’t take the pressure of your provision upon yourself. It is not only wrong to worry, it is unbelief; worrying means we do not believe that God can look after the practical details of our lives, and it is never anything but those details that worry us. Have you ever noticed what Jesus said would choke the Word He puts in us? Is it the devil? No— “the cares of this world” (Matthew 13:22). It is always our little worries. We say, “I will not trust when I cannot see”— and that is where unbelief begins. The only cure for unbelief is obedience to the Spirit.
The greatest word of Jesus to His disciples is abandon.
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Well played, God.
I laughed out loud. I could not believe it. An 80 year old daily devotional provided exactly what I needed, when I needed it. I was filled with joy when I thought of how God must have orchestrated events to make that happen. And this is all considering that I had accidentally read the wrong day's devotional, for that was Friday's devotional and the day was Saturday. Now, I'm not suggesting that God manipulated Oswald Chambers' pen 80 years ago just to provide me with hope. No doubt thousands of others have received peace from May 23rd's daily devotional. The words are what they are, and they are inherently good, just as the provided Scripture is always good and even more so. But I still couldn't help but feel that God did a little bit of work to make sure that I got the hope and peace that I needed at just the right time. And that is truly exciting.
After that, I read the daily Bible readings from a yearly plan I've been following, albeit at a much slower pace than intended. That was good too. Since then as I have really begun getting into fundraising and partnership development, I really have not worried about the challenge ahead. Certainly I am still aware of it, and am not underestimating it. I haven't put my feet up in my comfy chair and expected money manna to fall from Heaven. I am working hard, well aware that God will only provide if I am willing to put in the time and energy. And really, if money manna did fall down, I would be robbed of letting people in on the ministry in Berlin and sharing how excited I am about all that God is doing and will do there. And that is treasure that has nothing to do with money.