Dealing with a slightly different reality

Since my husband became a minister we have had a monthly paycheque.  This is fairly new for us.......in fact we went without a regular monthly cheque for most of the past 30 years.  It is called self-employment.  For us it wasn't a good thing.  Years of self employment + my husband's chronic fatigue syndrome + my arthritis etc. added up to our complete failure to provide for ourselves year after year.  Add in a small child.  Add in building a house that took too long to put up and cost a small extra fortune.  Add in a succession of broken down vehicles, each in worse condition than the last.  Add in the social humiliation of being "have nots" in a prosperous "have everything" town.  And what do you get?  You get the perfect opportunity for the Lord to show himself to be truly Jehovah Jireh, our perfect provider.  Christians are tested in many ways, and each situation and individual is unique.  The details of God's moving in your life will be different than in mine, but he makes himself known to all who seek him.  In our lives it was financial provision where the Lord became very real.  Years of having people come to our door, people who didn't know the extent of our financial crisis, looking perplexed and apologetic even, handing us envelopes filled with money or gasoline coupons and saying things like, "Ummm, I feel kind of embarrassed but I was praying for you and God asked me to give you this."  I well remember the first evening the reality of our financial downturn hit us.  Our mortgage payment was due the next morning and for the first time we didn't have it.  We didn't even have a dollar to our names to put toward it.  I started crying right around midnight because I couldn't believe we had no money at all....anywhere!  The previous week my mother had passed on a card to me from a family friend and I hadn't opened it yet.  My eye lit on it as I was wiping up the tears and I opened it.  Inside was a card and a cheque for the exact amount of our mortage payment plus enough over and above that for us to tithe.  The person who sent the card had no way of knowing we were in trouble.  My own mother didn't even know.  She couldn't have told him.  He said he just wanted to do something nice for us and wasn't sure why, it just seemed right.  And thus began several decades of watching God take care of us when we couldn't take care of ourselves.  We always worked, we always failed in a big way.  But spiritually we grew closer to the Lord.  The embarrassment overtook us sometimes, the frustration, the hurt of not being able to be like the "normal" people around us, the lost opportunities and not getting a break sometimes seemed beyond our ability to cope, but each and every time payments were made on time, groceries appeared, there was gasoline in the vehicle to get to work.  There was that chance few dollars that stayed in the bank long enough to make unexpected car repairs.  One Christmas we ended up with 3 grocery hampers and 4 turkeys........more than we could use and so lots to give away to others who had not been similarly graced.  I like remembering.  I like knowing that we are not dependent on this wee paycheque that we now have each month.  We depend on an awesome God who takes care of our every need even when we look outwardly like complete failures.  It makes it all worthwhile.