Of Spreadsheets and God’s Provision

Jennifer Stevens

Here is a confession: I am a world-class worrier. You

probably wouldn’t know it to look at me, but on any given day I have a flicker of worry going on behind the scenes. The list of things I worry about can seem a bit ridiculous: expired food, infected cuts, rabid racoons, and catching dread diseases found only in certain climates, but they are worries nonetheless.

Here is another confession: I love a good spreadsheet. I have spreadsheets for everything, and their clean lines and tabulations bring me an incredible amount of joy.

Ten years ago these two things about me didn’t seem as if they had much to do with each other at all. But then my husband lost his job and went back to school, and we had two small kids, a mortgage, and bills coming in.

I budgeted like never before and made our dollars do gym-nastics. I knew the price of every item in our grocery cart and gave up using our dryer to reduce the energy bill.

All of that worked. A tight budget kept us afloat, and when my husband got a new job, things

gradually changed for the better. But I never stopped with my spreadsheets. Any time I was con-cerned about anything financial, I would whip up a new spread-sheet. It would tell me when we were going to be okay and when to ramp up the worry. Excel gave me hope for the future and secu-rity for the present.

Enter in a sermon on steward-ship.

Now if you’ve been in the church world for long, you’ve probably heard a sermon or two on giving. We had as well, but what we gave didn’t really affect our budget. That is, until one Sunday when we heard yet another sermon on the topic and something inexplicably shifted in us. Our pastor said that giving wasn’t about giving God something he needed; instead, giving was about what we needed. Somehow that resonated with us.

So for the first time ever, we picked a percentage of our income to give and stuck with it.

Just to be clear, we didn’t get a raise that helped us afford this new output; instead, we gradually realigned our priorities. Some-times we made do by wanting less, and sometimes we found

more, but we stuck with giving our percentage.

Here is what happened to our finances: nothing. We didn’t expe-rience ruin. We didn’t have to give up eating cheese. We lived pretty much as we had lived before.

But what happened inside my head and my soul? That was different. Something shifted in a major way. I still kept my spread-sheets, and I still found things to worry about, but I could see God taking care of us right in front of my eyes. We always had enough. In fact, we had more than enough.

Here is something else that happened: I started to worry less. Not about dread diseases, since I still gave those a good run, but finances? Those didn’t worry me as much anymore. When I wasn’t holding on so tightly, I could see that God was at work all along. God was our hope and our future, not mathematics. He provided again and again.

I’m not going to lie and say that this was all easy, or that we don’t second-guess ourselves every once in a while. But seeing how God keeps on providing gets a bit addictive. And worrying less about money changes how we respond to other people’s needs. We are more generous because we know there is more than enough to go around.

Many passages in the Bible speak about giving. What I missed when I used to read them was how much giving would change us. We have experienced peace of mind, calm assurance that God is in control, and more generous spirits. For a person who was rigidly tied to spreadsheets and tightly wound with worry, this was an unexpected and amazing outcome of a choice we made one Sunday afternoon.

JENNIFER STEVENS likes a good book, a strong cup of coffee, and long chats with friends.

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98 purpose February 2020 / God’s Provision