Paid in Full

So I've been trying to put this post into words for almost two weeks!  That's how shocked and amazed I am.  But then I serve a Mighty God so why should I be shocked when he comes through in amazing ways?  Last week Ben and I were able to walk into a bank and say words I thought were still a long way off in coming,

"We'd like to pay our loan in full".

But first let me back up.  When we adopted Silas we fundraised like crazy, emptied our savings accounts, and applied for grants but it still wasn't enough to cover the cost of his adoption.  As a last resort we ended up applying for an adoption loan.

Fast forward a year and a half later and we are still paying on that loan.  It's not a huge payment but it has been looming over our heads for awhile.  We worked hard to pay off all of our debt before adopting Silas so it was difficult to go backwards in our financial plan.

By now you may be a little confused.  At the beginning of this post I said we paid off our loan in full! Well let me tell you the rest of the story.  We have always been very open about sharing our adoption story with others. When our new Lead Pastor asked if he could share our adoption story from the pulpit we saw no problem with it.  Little did we know that when he shared about our adoption debt that someone would feel led to come forward and write us a check so we could pay off our loan!  We. Were. Floored.

Our Lead Pastor was teaching on the Acts 2 church in which the people took care of each others needs, big or small.  The couple who chose to write a check to pay off our loan both felt God telling to them to take care of this debt for us.  The weren't even sitting next to each other in church at the time but when the wife went to talk to her husband after church "It was like we had been talking the whole time".

I didn't ask God to take this debt away.  But he did.  And the story gets even better.  When we looked into moving to Long Beach and crunched the numbers for our budget we came up a little short.  But we trusted that God wold provide and we would pinch our pennies as tight as we could in order to make a move to the beach happen.  Never in a million years is this how I pictured God providing!