How God Made Us Rich
Warning: This article contains explicit scenes of actual financial events.
Sometimes I get asked how we did it. When we got married, we were young (Ben was 20; I was 21), both studying (Ben was doing Psychology at the University of Wollongong; I was doing English Honours at the University of New South Wales (UNSW)), and supporting ourselves on casual wages (Ben worked in a bar at Kareela Golf Club; I was a sales assistant at Dymocks Miranda). Ben had never lived out of home before; I had (college for 2 years; sharing for 1½). Ben had never budgeted money before; neither had I. We both couldn't drive. What a combination! What a state in which to begin a marriage!
Yet God chose to bless us in many ways and over a long period of time. When I first went to Uni, he gave me a scholarship and financial support from my parents which allowed me to pay off my college fees, rent and expenses, and HECS debt, and still have savings left over. This is what we began with when we got married. Some of it we locked away in a term deposit and labelled our “baby fund”. Some of it we kept to live off.
As wedding gifts, God, through the generosity of our family and friends, gave us many things that were useful in setting up a new home: whitegoods (fridge, washing machine, dryer), electrical appliances (kettle, rice cooker, microwave), kitchenware (crockery, cutlery, cooking appliances) and furniture (lounge suite, dining suite and, of course, a bed). There was little that we had to purchase in addition to this, and what we did have to purchase came out of gift vouchers which were also given to celebrate the occasion of our marriage.
In the first year of our marriage we lived well even though we lived cheaply. I stopped working at Dymocks when the management changed and took up temp assignments three days a week instead. Ben continued at Kareela Golf Club until mid-year when he started complaining of back problems which were exacerbated by the lifting of large racks of glasses. He then quit and went on Youth Allowance which continued until he graduated. I'm still not sure, to this day, how we manage to survive the first year, what with rent, bills and the need for groceries coming out of our ears. But I do know that God blessed us richly: our neighbourhood butcher was a Christian and a family friend, and he would sometimes give us extra meat for free; my father bought us shares which, from time to time, produced dividends which seemed to show up when we needed it most; with the Lord's help, I gave up buying books which was a hangover addiction from my days at Dymocks when I could get a 25% discount. Best of all, the temp jobs that Select Appointments were getting me at Uni gave me useful experience that helped me when my mother, a Head of School, recommended me to the Manager of Student Administration in the Faculty Office of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW, as a casual. God placed everything and everyone in the right place at the right time so that I was able to give up the instability of temping for the slightly more stable position in that office.
Our giving, however, was erratic. Sometimes we were not organised enough to withdraw money out of the bank in time for Sunday; sometimes we plain forgot. Maybe even sometimes we deliberately forgot, which is a terrible thing I know. The only Christian organisations we supported were our church and Australian Baptist World Aid (I was supporting a girl in the Philippines through their Share an Opportunity program). It was a pretty poor effort on our behalf to give as God so generously had given to us.
That started to change when the studying came to an end. Two days before I handed in my thesis God made a job available in the School of English when the admin assistant there resigned after eleven years. At first, I just filled in temporarily on the days I wasn't working in the Faculty Office. Then the job was advertised. I went for it and God gave it to me. This created a vacancy in the Faculty Office amongst the casual staff; they needed a replacement so I recommended Ben. Through the grace of God, they were kind enough to snap him up. Working in the Faculty Office gave Ben enough experience so that, when he went for a job in the Student Centre in the Faculty of the Built Environment, God gave it to him.
Our financial situation started to settle down now that God had us both working full-time. The Baby Fund was up for renewal and we transferred the interest into our everyday account. God helped us to give more regularly with the aid of that wonderful invention called direct debit. He helped us to broaden our giving so that we not only contributed to church and Australian Baptist World Aid, but also to Wollongong ECU and Campus Bible Study which had both fed us spiritually throughout our undergraduate study at university. In addition, the Lord led Ben to start planning ahead for a possible future in full-time paid Christian ministry and service to God, seeking first to undertake the Ministry Training Strategy (MTS)—an apprenticeship that normally lasts for two years—before moving on to theological training at a Bible college. After years of persuasion by the women who manned the Moore Theological College information stand at an annual University Christian conference, Ben set his sights on raising the fees that would allow him to attend. He worked out that he could raise that amount by saving his salary for two years. With this goal in mind, we aimed to live off my salary (which was higher anyway) and save all of his. All our giving, rent, bills, groceries and other expenses came out of what I earned; all Ben's pay was locked away in what we started to call our College Fund.
Through God's grace in our second year of marriage we managed to survive. Once again he demonstrated his generosity to us through a series of unexpected events. A friend from church had just bought a flat as an investment and was looking for tenants he could trust. The Lord brought this news to our ears just as we were thinking of looking around for somewhere else to live. The rent was cheaper and the place was much nicer than the place we were living in so we moved in—just around a corner from where we had been. Then God put the idea in my mother's head that she should buy a new car and donate her old one to us. (Bear in mind that at this stage we still didn't know how to drive; the car, you see, was for us to learn on.) This made it easier to accumulate the 50 hours necessary to actually go for our license, and the Lord raised up many friends who were willing to endure the aches and pains of bunny-hopping and engine-stalling that ensued until we learnt how to control the thing. Finally, he watched over our tax return as the Australian Tax Office officials, horrified at the amount Ben earned in the last financial year, completely refunded all the HECS repayments they had been taking out of his pay, thus allowing us to give even more to the work of the gospel.
We are now in our third year of marriage. Last November the Lord gave me a promotion which enabled me to move from the School of English back into the Arts Faculty Office with a higher salary. God even had the Faculty of the Built Environment approve the Student Centre's request for reclassification so his salary will be going up soon. I am pleased to say that the Lord continued in assisting us in our giving so that this year we were able to also give to the Fellowship for Evangelism in the Visual Arts (FEVA) and to Lewis Jones, AFES staffworker for postgraduates and staff. God has indeed made us rich.
But even though we are rich now, we must remember that we are still rich even when we have no money, no assets, no home. We are still rich even when we are suffering and persecuted for what we believe. We are still rich when we are sick and distressed, abandoned and bereaved. We are rich because God, who is rich in grace, has bestowed his grace upon us through the Jesus' redemption of us on the cross and the subsequent forgiving of our sins (Ephesians 1:7). We are rich because he has given us the Holy Spirit who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance (1:14). We are rich because God has given us every spiritual blessing in Christ (1:3) and has chosen us, even before the creation of the world, to be his adopted children (1:5).
Sometimes I get asked how we did it. The simple answer is, we didn't do anything. God did it all.
Karen was hopeless at giving until God came along.
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