If You Give a Girl a Crisis

If you give a girl a $57 crisis...
she just might get angry and feel entitled to live without going through it.
If she gets angry and feels entitled she won't like it and she just might examine her heart.
If she examines her heart she'll find that the crisis really was an invitation to seek the God who led her there.
If she seeks God for a resolution to her crisis she'll lay at his feet the $57 she doesn't have.
If she lays the $57 at his feet she just might sense that he'll take care of that.
She'll re-balance her checkbook just to see.
When she re-balances her checkbook she'll find that she was roughly $50 off.
In her favor.
And after she finds that she's $50 off in her favor
she'll breathe a little easier and pretty much call it 'crisis averted.'

But that would be foolish because everything is always intertwined and connected and touching over and over like small boys wrestling when the work is done. There's more, stretched out and ever lasting more.

She'll find a reimbursement check on her counter for $13 for something she forgot she'd submitted.
When she picks up the check she's happy that she's now ahead by $5 but the check reminds her that she wrote another check to a friend to cover a field trip, but the friend actually wants cash instead of a check.  The field trip is tomorrow and the bank is closed.
When she turns to tack the check to the refrigerator she sees that her oldest's book of bus passes is empty and she needs $1 a day to get him home.  She feels frustrated and her happiness goes away.
When she feels frustrated she problem solves, rips up the check her friend doesn't want and borrows $4 cash from her other great kid to go with the $20 she'll withdraw from the ATM to equal the check's amount.
She goes to the ATM.
When she goes to the ATM she sees that she'll need gas for the field trip and she feels defeated.

When she sees that she needs gas, she asks not one, but two friends, if she can carpool with them.
When she asks her friends they both say, "no."
When they both say no, she gets an email from another much newer friend, one that she doesn't know well, one that might not share her worldview, one that simply needs someone to take her daughter to the field trip.
When she gets the email she may or may not close it and think she can't even get her own kids there let alone someone else's kid.
When she closes the email she might find that it won't leave her alone.
If it doesn't leave her alone, she knows it's a nudge.
In this season of her life, when she gets a nudge she follows it.
Because it won't leave her alone she opens it again.
She says, "yes" to the new friend and trusts that gas will just find its way to her tank.
When she trusts that gas will just show up so she can help a friend she learns a little about what it means to give out of her poverty.

When she fills her tank with gas her account is, again, $50 in the hole + the $4 she owes her great kid.
When her account is $50 in the hole she prays that God will take care of it and leaves her -$50 (actually  -$54) with him.
She takes her friend's daughter on the field trip.  They have a good time.
When she takes her friend's daughter on the field trip, her friend gives her $20 to share in the expenses for the gas.  She chokes back the gratitude.
When she's at the field trip the coordinator hands her back $3 because it wasn't as expensive as she thought and she gives this to her great kid so now she only owes him $1.
And later that night a friend who owed her $9 for a book she'd bought paid her back $10.
And another friend paid her back another $20.
And she finds $10 in her purse that she'd been looking for for a month.  No joke.
And since she had gas she went to pick up her oldest son from school instead of getting him bus passes so she paid her great kid back his other dollar.
And the girl decided to stop worrying and to trust God for her needs because she's now convinced that he's paying attention.  Which is exactly what she invited him to do when she said she'd give away 25% of her income during Lent.

{Giving out of Poverty. Lent 2013}