God continues to prove this more and more to our family.  God takes care of His children!

Less than two weeks ago I posted about how my husband’s company of 17 years laid him off.  It was sudden and completely unexpected after he served that company well for all of those years.  Shortly thereafter, one of his friends in the business learned of his lay off and offered my husband a temporary position to help the family out.  We greatly appreciated this offer and thanked God for blessing us with great people in this line of work that were willing to help out in our time of need.  Today, God showed up and blessed us with an even greater offer as my husband has now been given a more permanent position with that company!

Oh, thank you, God!!

I was in tears at this point as my husband gave me all of the details and discussed the different options available to him.

God is SO good, and we give him all of the praise, glory, and honor!

I feel this all has been building for a long time now.  You see, my husband’s focus was not what it should have been for years, nor were his priorities in the order that they should have been either.  He was a great Project Manager and served that company well.  I’m not saying that he wasn’t a model employee because he was.  However, there was sin in my husband’s life which we have spoken openly about here on this blog in the category to the right:  Men Struggling But Recovering.   I feel there is a connection here, so please hear me out.

Since my husband turned away from his sinful ways last year, a lot has changed!  First, it makes the enemy angry when we turn from our sin and walk toward God.  The enemy will try everything within his power to trip us up and to destroy us, our families, our lives.  I feel that when my husband finally broke free from the sin that held him in bondage for so long, it angered the devil even more so and he was determined to take my husband down.  He almost destroyed our family.  We almost did not make it.  There was talk of divorce at one point, and it devastated us both.  When it did not look good for us, we know that the devil was falling on the floor on his back laughing the most wicked laughter he possibly could.  He thought he ruined our family and had torn us apart, but God reached His hand down in the mist of it all and restored our marriage.  It is stronger today than it ever has been in the 12 years that we have been together.  It did not happen over night, but God held us through the transformation.  Through all of the heartache and pain, God was there holding us tight.  We both struggled with sin but in different ways.  God restored what we once thought was lost.  He strengthened our marriage and gave us such love, devotion, and intimacy as we’ve never experienced before.

Feeling sure that the devil grew more angry at the thought, he attacked yet another area in our lives;  my husband’s job.  You see, my husband poured all he had into the position that he held at that company of 17 years.  That became his identity, and he often placed that job in front of his own family.  To him, that needed to be his top priority.  That was who he was, and he was proud of it … until it was stripped away.

When he was called into the meeting at his previous place of employment where he would learn the news of his lay off, he grabbed a wooden cross and slipped it into his pocket.  This wooden cross had just been given to us at the pre-screening of the movie Do You Believe? which will be in theaters on March 20, 2015.  We all know that it isn’t a bed of roses when you are a Christian and are trying to do the right thing.  You will be persecuted, and you will struggle.  But, you turn to God even more so when it is happening because you know that He will be your strength and He will see you through!  Various different things happen in the movie to test people’s faith, too, but they believed in God and held on tight to Him … just as my husband has started learning to do.  He believes he was able to retain his composure in the meeting as well as he did due to that little cross in his pocket and having Jesus in his heart.

Deep down my husband is a good person.  We’ve all heard how bad things happen to good people all the time.  I believe that maybe God allowed this job loss to happen for a specific reason.  Maybe God allowed my husband to be stripped from this job because in one way, his sin increased at this job.  Not only that, but he idolized that job.  He put that job before his own family at times and most certainly before God.  That was wrong!  I tried to talk to him about this on several occasions, but I could not reach him.  Maybe it took God allowing him to be stripped of this position to dispose of ALL of the sin in his life.  Maybe, just maybe, it took him hitting rock bottom to realize that God was the rock at the very bottom that he needed to cling to.  And so … now he has.   My husband felt so very low after what happened last year with our family and now this year when our family was further threatened due to the job loss.  We didn’t want to face financial ruins, and yet the healthcare that the government has mandated now has the potential of doing just that as the premiums are so out of reach for the average person.  Family coverage was close to $900 a month in premiums.  Who can pay that in addition to the regular bills for necessities like food, clothing, a roof over our heads, electricity, etc.?  I’m not talking fancy trips, eating out all the time, and enjoying things beyond our means.  I’m talking now with the job loss, we feared we could not meet the basic bills to survive.

Were we tested?  YOU BET!  But, we held on to each other and to GOD!  My faith never wavered because I knew that God was going to take care of us.  I reminded my husband of what God had just done in restoring our family.  God didn’t take us this far to leave us.  He would carry us through this storm on to bigger and better things.  We just had to wait on God.

And then it happened!  God entered the picture riding in on a white horse dressed like a knight in shiny armor once more with the temporary position that he was offered less than two weeks ago … and now with the permanent position he was just offered.  Maybe my husband had to be stripped of all of the things due to the sin in his past so that God could start a new work in him.  I am a firm believer that God makes all things new – including me and you – so my thinking is that God allowed my husband to be taken down in the area of our marriage and in the area of his job to strip away the sin and make him a new man.  God is now rebuilding greater things for our family – our marriage – and his career.   All my husband had to do was let go of the sin forever.  He had to turn from his sinful ways for God to pour out His blessings.  Once my husband was stripped of these things, he changed his focus where it should have been – on God – and on me, his wife.

I have seen changes in my husband.  One striking thing that I’ve noticed is that last year he began kneeling down beside our bed every morning to pray.  He has done this some times without my knowledge, even kneeling down beside me as I slept.  On a few occasions, I woke up to find him kneeling in prayer right there beside me.  At other times, he would put his hand on me or slip his hand in my own as he prayed.  Then there are times he doesn’t wish to wake me, so he will resume his practice of kneeling to pray while I’m still sleeping.  The difference is that he takes time to pray now before rushing into his day.  He makes GOD a priority!  He realizes that God has blessed us – and even though we struggled after the job loss – God had big plans for our future, something that I also reassured my husband of often when he would get depressed about the situation.

And look what God has done!

Oh thank you, dear God, for restoring our marriage, for giving us a love for each other like never before and for us being committed to making our marriage the best that it can be!  AND Thank you, dear God, for blessing us with this new job opportunity at this company.  Thank you that doors have swung wide open for my husband and that blessings are coming our way better than we could have ever imagined.

That’s our God!

God takes care of His children!