Frequently my daughter calls to tell another chapter in her life’s story. Last week she talked about a financial shock involving her job as Christian Educational Director. She related the following:
I was going through and doing a reimbursement request for some expenses at church. I was looking over my credit card bill to be sure I had submitted everything when I realized I had submitted the same bill twice for three items. It was $800 of reimbursement overages. That’s a lot of money to have to repay! For a split second, I thought “if I don’t say anything, no one will know the difference. I stopped myself, ‘No, that is the wrong thing to do.’”
I went to the church bookkeeper and said, “I submitted this two times.”
The bookkeeper said “Oh.” She did not know what to do.
“I told the pastor. He shrugged and said, ‘this will get figured out’.”
“Obviously we will pay it back,” I said. “maybe it comes out of a different reimbursement check.” I was panicking. That is a lot of money for us.
I went back to my office and continued looking through the bills submitted for items bought. I found some I had missed, but still I figured that we owed $650.”
Later, a staff member stopped by my office and said, “You will probably hear this from someone else. The elders want to give everyone on staff a $1,000 bonus.”
When he said that I was reminded, “God does provide and God did.”
Her story reminded me of a big checkbook mistake we made 40 plus years ago. At the time Hubby and I talked about giving something extra to a missionary we supported. We quickly negated it saying, “Oh, we can’t afford to do that.”
Then we received our monthly bank statement. As we marked off canceled checks, we stopped in shock as we compared the amount written on the monthly check to that missionary and the amount in the check register. It was way beyond what we had recorded.
We quickly realized what had happened. The usual payday habit was to line up the checks to write, record the amount in the check register, subtract the amount left after each check we planned to write and then come back through and write the actual checks.
That month, when we decided we could not afford to give extra, we had written down all the potential checks, subtracted each from the total and then written all the checks copying down what we had written in the register. Except, when we got to the missionary check, we had copied the balance as the amount for the check to pay. We had given way more than our checking account could fund.
Horrified, we winced as we anticipated receiving overdraft notices. Like my daughter, I told it to my mother. She mentioned it to my little brother. He confidently said, “It will work out. God wanted them to write that check, He will take care of it.”
God did. We never received any overdraft notices. The next envelope from the bank was our monthly bank statement. We gingerly began ticking off checks cashed. One by one we compared the amounts on checks and studied the balance left after each. In that one month, we made more mistakes in adding and subtracting than we ever made before or have since. We subtracted an extra 100 dollars here or 10 dollars there. Those mistakes increased the amount of cash we actually had compared to what we recorded.
Through our human error, God covered that check for the missionary. It proved a point we have seen time and again: God does provide.