I guess I can start. I have a half hour before I have to go open shop.
I have a shop and that’s how I make money. I’ll start by saying I’ve struggled with this for the entire 3 years I’ve been there. I knew I was worrying about sales being slow and if I would have to close the shop and about how I would make money then.
I saw that if I was worrying about it, I was not believing and trusting what Jesus said, that I was not to worry about these things that unbelievers worry about but to seek God first and all these things would be added to me. I was not believing He would take care of me. My worry so obviously showed me my unfaithfulness, lack of trust.
I started to practice learning the obedience of trust in maybe some weird ways, I don’t know. Like, I stopped putting a few pieces on the sidewalk to draw people because I was determined to trust HIM to send people to buy my stuff. I experimented with that and found that I could set things out and have no sales and could NOT set things out and have a good sales day. That proved to me that it was best to practice my trust, even if the way I did it maybe made God scratch His head, I don’t know.
Then my family began to say things like, oh, you need to get one of those sidewalk signs or you need to advertise or you need to set some of your pieces on the sidewalk to catch people’s eyes. And when I said no, they got distressed with me and said it would be my own fault if I lost the shop. I got every phrase imaginable to try to get me to conform to the way all businesses do things, including: yes, but God doesn’t just expect you to do NOTHING! Of course, I wasn’t doing nothing, I was painting furniture, going on buying trips, displaying, vacuuming, washing windows, pricing, paper work, research and all the other exhausting things that go into running a business! But take the one thing I was doing to practice the obedience of trust on and it’s the thing they were so upset by. I thought, either I’m getting so much pushback from them because I’m really stupid or I’m getting the pushback from the world because I’m doing the right thing, but either way, I’m still going to be stupid and do it.
I am in another lean money time now, but after years of wavering back and forth in trust, I am standing firm in trust. I just think, well if I have to shut it down, it will be because Gods doing something else.
It has been a struggle but I’m standing unwavering now. I can now trust Him and be peaceful no matter how sales go. I’m not like most people, I don’t have a lick of retirement savings, but that doesn’t speak well of me and ill of them, because I can’t AFFORD to save, so it’s not like I chose to not save, it just happens to be my circumstance.
I don’t know why I had to struggle so much and practice so much before I could stop wavering in trust for my temporal needs. That was just where I struggled to learn the obedience of trust.
It’s the same thing Israel did in the desert. Temporal needs, food,water stuff.
