faith for faith

It has now been a little over a year since we first thought of beginning our Journey to Unindebtedness, and I have to say that it has been the most challenging year of my life, and I’ve little doubt that my wife would not say the same. It has been trying and complex, but, through it all, we cannot help but to have seen the sovereign hand of good and gracious God through it all. Even so, living life from day to day has been constant challenge to our faith and consequently to our godliness, and dealing with the struggles that seem to come up constantly can easily blind us to the Reality that encompasses it all. It is for us, as it were, a missing of the forest for the trees.

And while we must live our lives from day-to-day and direct each one toward the glory of God, it is of utmost importance to live a life of reflection upon the goodness of our God in Christ. For in not doing so (to which I can readily testify), we effortlessly fall into fits of grumbling and disbelief, much like the Israelites of old who grumbled against the God who for them parted the Red Sea. Therefore, this post is for me a reflection upon these things, and it also a much needed update in the series that I hope will be of some edification to you and your strivings for Christ-likeness.

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It has been a solid month-and-a-half since my last update to the Unindebtedness Journal, and many things have, by Grace, happened since that time. The last time I wrote was on September 1, 2009, and that was to report that we, with the help of my most generous in-laws, secured a piece of property on Promise Lane, about a mile from church, closer to work for both Haley and me, closer to our parents, and basically closer to everything except my part-time job and my brother in Christ, Paul Magee.:( We rejoiced over the Lord’s provision in the land’s acquisition, both because of its location, its price, and because of the fact that it was perfect for us in that mobile homes had been put on it in the past and a mobile home was what we were wanting to put on it while we paid off our debts and freed up funds for the sake of grace in generosity.

While that was a huge step in the whole process, we found that it was the first of many huge steps. Our next step from that point was up in the air, because, while mobile homes had been on the property in the past and there is a septic tank on the property, there is no well on the property, because the people who lived on the property before used a well located on an adjacent piece of property. At the time we bought the land, we were unsure of how the family who owns the surrounding properties would respond to our buying the land, and we were pretty convinced in our own minds that they would not allow us to share the well that the lot formerly shared, and, because of that, we would have to have our own well dug before we could do anything else.

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It is settled. The first step on our journey to unindebtedness is complete, namely we, with the help of relatives, have closed on a piece of property for a great price just a couple miles from where our church gathers, our family lives, and closer to both our places of employment. God is indeed gracious and good. And thus it has been proven that land can be purchased through Craigslist.:)

The seemingly ironic part of this is that we are actually more in debt now than we were before. Therefore the next step is to figure out how we are going to sell our home in Raleigh so that we can free up our credit to settle onto our newly acquired property. And this step is possibly more complicated than the first, though that did not seem to be the case before we closed on the land.

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I am not a worrier. When it comes to sinful deficiencies, an anxious heart is not one of my natural vices. I do not claim this boastfully, for I know that my lack an anxiety comes more from my natural disposition toward apathy than it does from my faith in God. For in my life thus far, I have lived my life with little care about the particulars of my future and have self-righteously chalked my lack of planning to my trust in the sovereignty of God. And while it is indeed true that “The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Prov. 16:9), God, in a demonstration of the greatness of his power, has chosen to allow men to plan their steps and yet sovereignly ordains and orchestrates all things pertaining to humanity through the wills of men.

Yet the Scripture’s unabashed proclamation of God’s meticulous sovereignty and his great power are never presented as justification for a “que sera, sera” attitude toward life. Proverbs 16 exists as a demonstration of this, holding together that which cannot be comprehended by the human mind, namely that a godly man plans and commits his steps to the Lord, yet the Lord has already established his steps. The apostle Paul puts it this way: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12, 13). Therefore we are to work, for God is working in us.

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After much going back and forth with our potential lender–submitting documents and submitting more documents–it finally seems as though everything is going to go through on the land loan. And I thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.

We have signed pre-disclosure statements with the lender on the loan, and we are simply waiting for an appraisal to be done on the property and for a title search to be done by the attorney. If all that goes well, we are well on schedule to close on the land before month’s end.

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I had not planned on adding another entry into the journal until something a bit more significant had happened, but not to include the struggles that we have had thus far would not be a truthful representation of our so-called journey to unindebtedness.

Because of our past decisions–most of them foolish, some of them not as much–we have incurred a great amount of debt when compared to our present income. Because of this, we have been denied a loan twice with just mine and my wife’s name on the loan, and to get approved for the loan we are going to have to add a more financially stable co-signer to the loan, namely my father-in-law.

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It has been three weeks since my last entry in the Journal (thus rendering it not a “journal,” but I digress), and little that is concrete has happened as of yet. However, things (it seems) are being set into motion, and, on the surface, the Lord appears to be paving the way for us to go forward with our plan.

I, my wife, and my father-in-law met with a loan officer at a local bank in Wendell on Thursday, and we applied for a lot loan with them to secure the land that we contracted to buy. We have not heard anything from the bank as of yet (we are expecting to hear something on Monday), and we are praying, as we have been throughout, that the Lord will make his will known to us and that he will close doors where he does not want us to go.

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Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law (Rm. 13:8).

Though the above-mentioned verse may be taken out of its context for my purposes intended, I do believe the concept of living a life free of financial debt is a biblical one. For the Christian, as long as he owes debtors on this earth, he is a slave to two or more masters–to the Lord and to those whom he owes. And while one is indebted to financial lenders, he is under obligation by the law and the Lord to be faithful to those debts, though those debts may inhibit him from serving the Lord in a free and zealous way.

Through years of my own stupidity, I have enslaved myself to many masters. For I bought into the culture that declares that all should be able to partake of the luxuries of this world, and have, for several years, lived a life that’s luxuries have far exceeded my means.

For this reason, my wife and I, after many discussions, prayers, and pouring over of the heart of God revealed in the Scriptures, have decided to do something about the tremendous debt that we have. We have looked upon the world’s remedy (which is to finance things for thirty years or more), and have decided that that remedy is not the best way for us to serve and honor the Lord. Therefore, we are seeking, by God’s grace, to figure out a way that we can, as Christians in America, rid ourselves of our debt-masters in as short amount a time as possible, and live within our means the rest of our days, being ready to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, if the Lord so desires.

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