God of the unexpected...

Some of our adventures in trust involve finances for our ministry as missionaries working with Native Americans. What I find over and over is that God sends surprises, working in ways that I never would have figured. One of our issues is that it is coming up on time for our "Homeland Ministry Assignment" which is a time when we re-connect with prayer partners, financial supporters, and supporting churches. By the time this is happening, our current level of support has gotten to the point of "woefully inadequate." Most people understand how this happens, because they deal with cost increases all the time in their lives and know missionaries must as well. With our mission, our account can actually go into a negative or deficit situation, at least a bit, because they try to give us a chance to get the support back up before they have to do things like withhold our salary. (We are very glad of this!) However, it all has to be made up and there is a certain point they won't let us go beyond. And we keep getting dangerously close to that point and then God sends some of His wonderful surprises: once, from a prayer partner who had never been a donor before; another time, through a fellow missionary.

This freefall into negative dollars continues to happen until we have enough people pledge more support, and when we go on HMA we are given a particular monetary figure we must have coming in to be fully funded. The thing that has me excited today is that I just found a mistake in the way I was counting some funding, which made it look like we needed $1800 more coming in per month, when actually we only need $1200 more a month! And I was thinking, "Isn't this just like God? I'm looking for Him to bless us with quite a lot more funds, and instead He shows us that we don't need as much as we thought."

It happens to us all sometimes, doesn't it? Whether He shows us how we can save money somewhere, or whether He does things for us that inexplicably make what we have last longer than it should have, He has ways to do things that we never would have figured out. That's why it's such a joy to trust Him!