A continuation of my attempt to finish a book I started in December 2017. Posting chapters in an attempt to organize it all and finish.
Eventually I depleted all of my savings and the work I was doing wasn’t paying all of my bills. I was down to my last twenty dollars with no idea when I would be getting money again. And I needed to buy some food to eat.
My grandparents lived through The Great Depression. My grandfather even wrote a book about growing up in a mud basement house that was dug into the dirt out in Wyoming. My grandmother talked about reusing paper napkins.
And after my biological parents divorced, my mother had to make do on $500 a month for child “support” for two kids. Our big treat back then was going to Taco Bell on Fridays after we cleaned the house before she got home from work. She’s give us a $3 limit each and it was always an exercise in self-denial to decide what to order.
So if there was one thing that fear passed down to me, it was definitely how to survive on almost nothing. And as such, I didn’t initially think twice as I went through the Schertz H-E-B and filled my basked with the cheapest food I could find: Ramen noodles, peanut butter and jelly, etc.
As I was about to go check out, I felt like Spirit asked me, “Is that what you really want to eat?”
“Well, no. Of course not. But I only have twenty dollars to my name.”
I felt like God was encouraging me to spend as much of the money as I wanted to spend in order to get the food that I really wanted to eat. I felt like God was telling me that if I didn’t spend the money to get more nourishing food then I was putting my trust in the money versus putting my trust in Him.
I was actually mad about this. “You’re asking me to spend all of my money, God?!” So I kinda angrily went around the store putting the cheap food back and then buying all the food I really wanted. Spending almost all of my last twenty dollars.
I went back to where I was staying at Julie’s and then ate all of the delicious food and went to bed. I called it my last supper. Like right before Jesus was crucified. Or right before a person on death row is put to death. Because I had no idea when I’d have money to buy food again.
The next day my mother called me. She said she was cleaning up a pile of papers on her kitchen counter and found a check my grandparents had sent her for me months ago. She never told me about it until this phone call. And it had been sitting there all that time. She asked me if I wanted it. Of course!
The check was for $200! God “paid me back” ten-fold for the money I spent the previous night.
Just like Hagar, I knew that God had seen me. Just like Hagar, I also gave God a name that day: “The God of the Lost Birthday Checks”!
That experience did so much for me and continued to encourage me for years to come. Because I had a real experience with God! Something nobody could take from me even if I couldn’t explain it to them in a way they approved of. There was no arguing with me – I knew what I had experienced. Once I was blind, but then I could see.
No well-meaning sermon could ever touch that. I knew God was and is real! And loved me. And saw me! Cared for me! Personally!
I was working yesterday as I was thinking about posting that story as my next chapter. I pulled into a gas station and went inside to pay for my gas. An elderly homeless man approached me in the store. He very excitedly started telling me about something that happened to him.
He said that some people had robbed him. They had stolen all of his belongings from the camp site that he had meticulously setup and maintained. He expressed how he felt devastated and betrayed that these people took everything from him – even all his clothes.
But as he was standing at the ATM, he told me that he was walking by the gas station and God told him to check his balance in his bank account. Lo and behold there was $200 on his card that he hadn’t known was there.
I excused myself and went to pump my gas. As I was doing so, he again approached me at the gas pumps. Out of all the people at the busy store, out of all the people at the gas pumps. But still very respectful even as he seemed so insistent on communicating to me multiple times with great joy: “Ma’am, God was looking out for me. I am able to eat today and I have money left over in my pocket! Those people stole from me, but God was looking out for me. “
Just a coincidence running into this man?
Sarah Nyhan 
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