I am not a generous person by nature. I am a super-saver a little too obsessed with being frugal.
A little over two years ago, Jesus rescued me from my misery and I became a Christian. In that time, God has been nudging me to trust Him instead of my savings account. In fact, since I became a believer, I have watched our savings account go from $20,000 to about $500. (the reasons why don't have much to do with this post). God saved me just in time really, because the old me would have been an anxious, obsessed mess, full of blame and hatred and resentment toward my husband, scrambling to make some extra cash and stow it away. Not that it's bad to be a saver, but for me, it was an idol, something I placed above God.
Soon after I started following Jesus, I learned that I needed to start tithing to my church as an act of obedience to Christ. The wrench in that was that my husband was not a believer at the time. Now if you have been in this situation, you surely have wrestled with what to do. I dabbled in all the options:
-don't tithe
-tithe only on my income, which is little to nothing since I am a stay-at-home-mom
-make some extra money by donating plasma and give that away (I only did that once and when I tried to do it again, my then 18 m.o. cried so much in the childcare that they told me I couldn't donate)
-tithe without my husband's knowledge (deceitful)
-tithe 5% of our income, using the rational that half of everything we have is mine, so I can give away 10% of that.
None of these felt quite right. I don't think there is a good answer to this dilemma, except to keep praying about it and trust that God knows your true heart's desires.
My husband has become a believer in the last 6 months (a miracle in itself) and now we do tithe. Which brings me to giving.
I have been having the itch to give, a feeling I can only attribute to God's working in my heart and life, since, as I said before, I am not a generous person by nature. And now I'm finding myself in another tricky situation. The easy thing to do is just to give when I want to, to whom I want to, and how much I want to. Since I take care of paying all the bills, I could do this. It wouldn't require having difficult conversations with my husband. But that's not the right path. Neither can I bombard my husband with pleas to give to this or that. I keep praying about this, because I want us to give together, united.
Lest you think my husband is stingy, he is not. He is more generous by nature than me. He works hard so I can stay home with our small children. We live pretty frugally and do without a lot of things. But at the same time, we live in abundance.
Every month, I wrestle with what to save, what to give. And every month, we have enough, enough to be comfortable and content, not go into debt, AND enough to give. Sometimes, it doesn't even make sense on the spreadsheet, but somehow it works out in real life.
