by Tim Howington
This book is the by-product of a painful process of financial anxiety over about a 12 month period where the Lord sustained my family by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. We paid every bill, ate every meal, and never lost our housing, transportation or the clothes on our back. So, by those standards we were very blessed, and to some degree, we learned to be content.
But, every night I prayed diligently for the Lord to intervene in our lives. Every day I worked hard to secure the funds we needed to survive. And while I desperately wanted the “Lord’s will” to be financial stability in my family’s life, I knew that there was something else going on that was bigger than just me paying bills on time. The Lord was stripping me of my pride and my independence. The Lord was teaching me about how to manage my spirit when there was no money (little money) to manage. The Lord was connecting me to the needs of families all around me who are living paycheck to paycheck and asking themselves if God can be trusted.
One of the advantages I have had in this life is growing up poor. My folks split up when I was 10 years old and I can still remember the morning that my Mom drove me, my younger brother and my younger sister to my Grandma Sasser’s house in Arkansas. That quick trip from Dallas led us into a life of a single mom provision and straight to the poorhouse. How we survived on my hard-working Mom’s minimum wage job is still a mystery to me. I didn’t really know it at the time, but hindsight shows that God’s hand was on us even in our dire financial situation.
My Mom’s spiritual renewal in my early teens would begin to shape the way our family would evaluate what makes a person rich or poor. She would begin to introduce us to an idea that the “man who has God and everything else has no more than the man who has only God.” She would live the rest of her life scratching and clawing to make a living and clinging to a God who had promised to take care of her and her family. When she died, she left us a legacy that we will never forget. In her will (actually a typed up letter to our family), she instructed us to not fight over any of her stuff. But she admonished each and every one of her children, son-in-laws, daughter-in-laws, and grandchildren to follow the Lord. She left this world with not much except a family who adored her and who followed the God she had come to know as her “portion”. He was all she wanted and she showed us how to live that out.
My inheritance from my Mom was not material in nature, but spiritual. She lived out for me what God has promised us and what we can expect from Him. And as the Psalmist says, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Indeed, my heritage is beautiful to me.” I hope to share with you some insights related to what we as believers can expect from the Lord as our portion in this world. Our portion is both material and spiritual in nature and is promised by God. My Mom would have loved this book! Hope you enjoy!
This book is dedicated to Mom- Charlotte. Her smile in the face of financial adversity for the last 40 years of her life was a great example of trusting God in the midst of the storm.
Charlotte Ann Sasser- 1940-2013