The Offering and God's Faithfulness

We need to share a testimony of God’s faithfulness. We are so utterly amazed by his total faithfulness.

On Sunday October 26 Cindy Jacobs came and spoke at Harvest Rock at the night service. Brooke and I were there and the message was somewhat powerful, but nothing in it really impacted me.
However, at the very end of the service she made an appeal to the congregation to give an offering for Harvest Rock to be able to purchase the land around them. Immediately, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit very, very strongly upon me. I prayed and asked God how much He wanted me to give as I always do. Immediately, I clearly heard Him say, “Give $1,000.” I knew it was the Lord, so I just said “Yes Lord. Whatever you will. You are our provider.” But then I thought in my mind that the confirmation that this is truly from the Lord is that Brooke will feel total peace about it too. If she does not feel total peace about it I will not give the offering. I looked over at Brooke and told her that the Lord told me that we need to give $1000. Suddenly, her jaw began violently chattering, she began speaking in tongues, and the presence of the Holy Spirit fell all over her. I asked her if she felt total peace about the offering and she said that she did.

Now just for you to understand how huge of a sacrifice and leap of faith this was for us let me explain to you our financial situation. We came to California completely living by faith and relying on God. I felt the Lord telling me not to work and to only live by faith, so that’s what we did. I told God that I would do that, but if He didn’t provide us with a place of our own to live after one month then we would start working. After one month God provided for us in many ways, but not with a house of our own. However, we were hired full time to work with The Call, but we were not paid for this job. WE only received free room and board. So our bank account was slowly dwindling away until we only had $1200. This is when God spoke to us to give the $1000, which would be everything we had, because we still had to pay our bills for the end of the month.

So we gave that offering from the depths of our hearts knowing that it was God who was telling us to do it. We prayed, "God we have absolutely nothing now. We only have You. You are the One we depend upon. We don't depend on our bank account, a job, our friends, our family, the government, or anything in this world. We depend upon You. You are our Provider." I then went into a time of deep, deep prayer crying out to God for more of Him and for Him to come through with faithfulness.

We left that meeting in total peace. We were not scared at all. We were not worried about how we would pay for our next meal or fill up our gas tank because we just knew that God would be faithful to provide for us. He never failed on us before. He's definitely not gonna fail on us now. I know my Jesus and I know that He is faithful.

Sure enough, that same week my parents felt led from the Lord to send us a check of $300, which they never have done before since we moved to California. Then our friend Julie McGuire spontaneously gave us a donation of $100 for gas money to go to The Call.
Then on Nov. 3 I received a phone call from Jubilee saying that someone dropped off a check for us at the Jubilee office and we needed to come pick it up. We were still in San Diego when I received the phone call, so the next day we stopped by the church to pick up the check. We were expecting the check to maybe be $50 or $100 because already once or twice people had given us money in this way and that's about how much they gave. However, when we opened the envelope the check said $2,000 on it!!!!! What?!!! That's my God! He is faithful! We gave $1,000 and he gave us $2,400 in one week! More than double!

Not only that. For more than a month I had been looking for a job and this same week that we received the check Brooke and I got part time jobs working for a coffee business that's starting me at $10 an hour. Currently, I have a part time job with Crissy's Coffee and I have a part time job with Mrs. Fields. Brooke has three part time jobs now!!! She's working at Liz Claiborne, Crissy's Coffee, Mrs. Fields. All of the jobs are totally awesome, lots of fun, and we have the greatest bosses ever. The owners of Crissy's Coffee and Mrs. Fields are all life long friends that I have known very well since my childhood. So it's lots of fun to work with them and they are very flexible with our schedules. Brooke's manager at Liz is a devoted Japanese Christian, so they have tons of fun together too.

We are currently renting a room from a friend for the next two months for only $275 a month.

Furthermore, last week we needed to buy milk and cheese and we had practically no food in the house we had just moved into. So we went to the supermarket to buy milk and cheese, but we ended up buying quite a bit of food. The next day we went to Jubilee Church where they were donating food to the community and we received four huge Trader Joe's brown bags full of food. Then the day after that after a long day of work for the L.A. Auto Show Crissy Coffee had 14 gallons of milk left over. They were going to throw them all away because they had nowhere to refrigerate them. So we took them and gave them to several families and the church's community house. Also, there was a catering company there who served excellent gourmet food. I'm talking salmon, chicken with pruschetta, fine chocolates, amazing rice, etc. and they were going to throw it all away right when Brooke and I were leaving. The manager told us that by law they could not eat any of the food or take it home, but we could since we are not in their company. So they bagged up all the food for us and since then we have been eating like kings. Now we have a problem! We have too much food and we don't know how we're gonna eat it all before it spoils! GOD IS FAITHFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And on top of all of that gas is dirt cheap now. Hallelujah!