Pre-Departure Provision

Liebe Freunde und Familie,

Halo, and welcome to my blog! I hope to try and update my blog at least once a week while I am abroad, maybe more, maybe less. Eh, I don’t really know what to expect this summer, so it is hard to say for sure. I will also write a few posts pre-departure to update everyone on what is happening beforehand. So, post number one: commence!

Spoiler alert: If you feel uncomfortable at all with talking about finances, I would stop reading here. Just to glorify Jesus in the magnitude in which he deserves to be glorified, I am going to be pretty explicit in talking about my financial situation over the past year. So, buckle up.

 I would say the moment this trip became real was one day back in October. It was a Monday (I remember, because of course all bad things happen on Mondays). I had been on campus all day; I had just decided that I would be traveling with API (Academic Programs International) to Berlin for the summer. When I declared my major as international studies at the end of my freshmen year, I knew that it would be expensive. Study abroad is required for INTS majors. And let me tell you if I have learned from this whole experience so far, it is that study abroad costs money. Lots of it. So on that Monday, I came home from campus, trying to stuff down the feelings of uncertainty of how I would manage to pay for my summer, thinking that I was doing a pretty good job of hiding my feelings. This guy came over a little while later:

And funny thing about him: he has a way of reading me. It did not take long for him to see behind the fake happiness with which I was masking my anxiety. All it took was for him to ask, and then the tears started to roll. Sweet Bryan, being the faithful man that he is, promptly said he thought we should pray for $20,000. This was one of those moments when I wanted to laugh from absurdity, but of course I could not admit my unbelief. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the power of God. I do. Okay fine, probably not as much as I should. Lord, help me overcome my unbelief (Mark 9:24). So we began that day to pray for the Lord to somehow provide $20,000. Absurd, I know. Weekly we would pray. I knew that God’s provision is good and abundant (Malachi 3:10), but somehow I still doubted that He would do something miraculous for me. A few weeks later I got a call from a family member saying that they wanted to provide me with funds for my education. I started to think, “huh, maybe this whole praying for God to provide thing is actually going to work.” That was only the beginning. We continued to pray.  Over the next several months, I slowly received scholarship after scholarship. The verse in Malachi about the assurance of God’s provision started becoming more and more real until I was only $1,700 short of reaching the goal of $20,000 we began petitioning God for in October. I will be honest; I was pretty content at this point. I kind of expected Him to stop providing. I mean, $18,300 was still a lot of money that he had provided. But Jesus is funny that way, it’s almost as if as soon as I begin to doubt, he proves me wrong. I soon received an e-mail notifying me of another scholarship!

And he didn’t stop there. Another thing I had been praying for was someone to sublease my room. Finding a sublet can be such a tease. Since spring break when I first put the ad up on Craig’s list, I had several girls text me that they were interested. However, for one reason or another, it just did not work out. They flaked. And again, right as I began to doubt that God would provide, bam! A sublet fell right into my lap last week. What was even funnier was that she wants to sublease for the exact dates which I will be out of the country.

So the moral of the story is: we have a God who provides for his children abundantly. There is no other way to describe how all of the stressful details of this trip fell into place other than knowing that it all came from the Lord’s provision. I have the favor of the King of the universe, as does everyone who humbly asks for it. If God is the perfect parent, the loving father, and the faithful bridegroom that we believe him to be (which He is), then why wouldn’t he provide for us? That is the job of a parent or a husband, and the Bible equates him to both of those roles.

“In the world, you will find tribulation; but take heart, for I have overcome the world.” –John 16:33