The fifty-dollar bill
My all time favorite, because it happened soon after I gave my life to the Lord and it almost shocked me how close and real God wants to be with me. It made a great impact on my life and made me realize that God is in control.
So it must have been 1995 or 1996, I was unhappily married to man who rather took the paycheck to the bar on Friday night. It will not take much imagination to figure out that I was struggling trying to pay bills while he preferred the happy life.
To my surprise, he came home one weekend handing me a fifty-dollar bill that his boss had given him as a bonus and said to me, “Go buy you something nice”. Now this was unheard of around our home and I was quite impressed, well at least for a couple of hours while thinking over my possibilities.
Pretty soon though, my joy turned to anger, “What is he thinking, ‘Go buy you something’ – while there are bills unpaid? He is just one unreliable man, nothing but fun in his head.” Of course Monday morning, after a weekend of silent griping I went and paid bills with my fifty-dollar bill.
The griping went on until I got a phone call from a lady in the village next to us. She said God had told her to give me something. When I went over there she handed me an envelope and said to open it when I got home. It was a fifty-dollar bill! It instantly hit me, because this was not just a fifty-dollar bill, but it came from a woman who struggled to provide for her three children who she was raising by herself.
A very humbling lesson learned, for one, to see her faith and obedience and to see my thankless fussing, and realizing that God sees everything. I gladly took the money back to her saying that it had already fulfilled its purpose.
God is so good!