Sufficiency and abundance

I left church this morning filled up. In our sunday school class we're working our way through 2 Corinthians (which is one reason you've seen a lot of that here lately!) and today were in chapter 9. Both Matt and I found this verse towards the middle to be just the right encouragement for this time:

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

(and in another version, like this:
 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed;)

The completeness of the sufficiency that God is capable of providing is of an all-encompassing sort.  All sufficiency in all things at all times. And then the second part - not only is he able to make his grace abound to us for just "sufficiency" but when it comes to the good work that he has prepared for us to do, he is able to provide an abundance.

Matt and I have seen that over the last year. We've always marveled and delighted in the fact that although we've never had a lot, we have always had enough. But last fall when God started showing us the big plans he had for us for the upcoming year, it was something that would require way more than just what is sufficient for day to day living. Last September it was "simply" pursuing the large addition to our house to make room for his mother to come live with us AND him making it clear in a variety of ways that he was expecting us to do it without taking out a mortgage. Yikes. And then, if that wasn't enough, it was in October of last year when we learned that what we had thought was a huge financial barrier to our being able to pursue international adoption (our income does not meet the USCIS guidelines for sponsoring an immigrant) was gone, because when you are adopting, you can apply your assets to your income to reach the required minimum!! The money that God was beginning to provide to us for the work on the house already at that time was there so that finances were a complete non-issue for the adoption.

But that put us in a situation where over the next 12-plus-a-little-bit-more months we would need to see nearly 5 times our regular yearly income come through in addition to our regular yearly income to take care of the regular cost of living expenses. That seems impossible, huh?

And here we are, right now, with the adoption completely paid for (well, we still have post-placement reports to do which will have expenses associated with them, but that's pretty minimal and spread out over the next two years), and many, many expenses on the house also covered. Just today we realized that we had paid our framer $12,000 more than we thought we had! That means our last payment to him will be much smaller than we'd been thinking as we were tallying costs for the remainder of 2013 - super exciting! It's not actually "money in the bank" but it sure felt like that this afternoon when Matt looked into it, and sure enough - we've got most of that already paid!!

Of that huge amount - five times plus some of our yearly income in addition to what we need, we probably have already seen 80-85% of that come through.

And yet our human minds on their own are so time-bound. I can look back on the past and see the amazing work that God has done, and still look forward and wonder how it's all going to work out. Shame on me. ;) I have loved the phrase "fight the good fight of faith" because in so many ways I am realizing that every moment of every day is an opportunity to choose to believe or to not believe.

We have seen God as able to supply our needs sufficiently, and we have also seen him provide an abundance for the good work that he has prepared for us to do.

And, as a side note about sufficiency, my experience with this is not that, for example, He promises that I will always get a full eight hour night's sleep, which is considered a healthy amount. But he DOES promise that his grace will abound such that the sleep that he does provide to me will be sufficient for what he calls me to each day. In fact, the less the sleep, the more dependent on his abundant grace I become! And then there are times when out of the blue (like last night!) he chooses to delight us with a great night's sleep. I can't tell you the last time I slept as well as I did last night - 8.5 hours in bed and only out of bed twice in the night, and neither of those times were for seizures, nor did they last long! And, miracle of all miracles, Reuben, aka "I never sleep past 5:30am or maybe 6am if you're really lucky and sometimes am up for the day earlier than either of those" slept until 7:06!! Without any seizures!!! We, as many of your already know, are of course too dumb to remember little things like Daylight Saving, so we made a hearty scramble and were putting shoes on at what we thought was 8:45 getting ready to make it to church by 9 despite "sleeping in" when we realized we were an hour early. Oops. ;)

It has been really neat for us to see many people at our church stepping forward in various ways to help our family out in the last few weeks. Today we were given a pie, an offer of construction help for Matt, someone who asked if I needed help with housework (you mean people actually *clean* their houses?? Oh yes. I used to do that. ;) ) and a start at a list of people who are planning to help us out with a weekly meal. 

And this morning we sang the song I shared last night.


Now Lord I would be yours alone and live so all might see,
The strength to follow Your commands could never come from me

I can't handle everything that's coming our way. To follow my Jesus and trust in him is something that can't come from me - it is only because his grace abounds to me and drives me to believe what he promises.