Before we get to today’s article, I just want to mention that am writing from the perspective of a man that has experienced many of the challenges of which I write…. and those spiritual battles continue daily. The articles are implications of what it means to obey the commandment to raise your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. They require some reflection and are particularly for Christians who, as Peter would say, are diligently seeking to confirm their calling and are making every effort to supplement their faith. Said more succinctly, serious Christians. If you know other believers who desire to walk more faithfully with the Lord, please forward an article to them and tell them to sign up for future articles. Thanks so much!
This is the third article in a series of four. Please refer back to Chapters 1 and 2 if you have missed them.
God had given me a new heart and the transformation of my thinking and desires was dramatic. I didn’t care about money anymore. All I wanted to do was read the Bible so I could learn more and grow in my newfound faith. But my troubles were not over by a long stretch. I had $300,000 of unsecured debt, no money, and a marriage that I was waking up to realize had been rotting under the weight of a decade of my selfishness.
One thing I want to note is that becoming a Christian does not automatically come with a new basket of wisdom. In fact, new Christians, zealous to learn more and for everyone to know the truths of the Bible, often do stupid things. The first stupid thing I did was go from being a workaholic to not being motivated to work at all. Just wanted to spend time with Jesus. This was clearly an unbiblical approach to living and providing for your family. It was completely irresponsible and in fact, disobedient to clear commandments found in the Scriptures and served to push Robin further away. It will also make your spouse think you’re a lunatic and she began seriously working toward divorcing me.
She had gone along with my worldly desires for many years but found out that no matter how much she supported me, I did not love and support her as a should. Probably the thing that cranked up the growing resentment and bitterness was having to go back to work. She had been a stay at home since we started having children, but when I took on more business risk and debt, we needed her income. It began gradually back in N.Y. with limited hours as she waited on tables at a friend’s restaurant but had become a fulltime situation when our second child was only two. She hated dropping off our little girl to daycare each day but soldiered on. She was back in the physical therapy world, and she was very good at her job. As the months passed, she began to find her joy in the job, and it stealthily became her idol.
Robin was raised in a strict church setting which trained her to think that God was more concerned about the length of her skirt and other outward behaviors than her heart. Like me, she had walked away from religion after going away to college and at this point in our lives together, she was intent on establishing her income and getting other details in order so she could divorce me. Also like me, she did not see that God was coming for her.
Robin started having some trouble at work. There were a growing number of ethical issues that she had to deal with on the job and being a rather black and white thinker, she struggled to go along and get along with various situations.
Six months had passed from my conversion and God was holding us together. We had sold the apartment building and a house in N.Y., and I had gone back to working in the insurance world. I was flipping money and credit lines to keep the debt situation at bay and had never been late on any payments to date, but I was running out of time. I had to face the creditors. This meant contacting each one of them, confessing my failures, and asking for some kind of special arrangement. I dreaded those calls, but one stranger after another gave me what we needed. It was God showing Himself again and His sovereignty over banks, people, and every situation.
Brothers Jim and John and their wives were preparing to visit us in Atlanta for Christmas, and they suggested that we attend a church that we had often seen on TV, First Baptist Atlanta, and Charles Stanley. It had been six months since my conversion, and I still had never been to a church. Robin was antagonistic to any mention of my faith, so she was not interested in going to church that Sunday in December. However, Robin’s mom, who was not a Christian at that time, told our children to ask their mom to take them to church. Out of guilt, Robin agreed to the kid’s request and off we went.
My brothers and their wives prayed hard that day for a life changing evangelistic sermon from Charles Stanley. We were terribly disappointed when the sermon was about tithing. We each took turns glancing towards Robin during the sermon and noticed a tear streaming down her face. We learned later that tithing was a flashpoint between her mother and father during her childhood and Robin was being affected by God’s word. Her heart was beginning to crack. Three months later, after God crushed her joy on the job, she cried out to the Lord, and He saved her.
We were starting marriage over. For the first time, I began to understand what love was from the Bible and she saw the fruit. God had united us in a way that no human covenant could and now we were facing our troubles together.
In another instance of the zealot Christian striking again, I wrote a fifteen page letter to every friend and relative Robin and I knew and told them that they were going to hell if they didn’t turn to Christ for salvation. Now, I know many people say that sharing the gospel is all about relationships and that you must not come on with the gospel until you have really formed a good relationship, but I also think that that approach is often overplayed to the point of never telling someone the gospel, or at least one that is actually true to the Bible. That said, writing a letter that is essentially trying to beat someone into submission is not the right approach either.
Writing the letter to immediate family members and following it up with many impassioned and direct conversations, yielded particularly bad results. In fact, you would have probably classified our family conversations as war. The battles took place on an open battlefield and later settled into regular skirmishes, before reaching the “we don’t talk about that” stage. Although both sides have become civil in recent years, the division remains. It seems like we could have done better.
The third example of the things that new Christians might do is to immediately go into full time ministry if someone had made it possible. I’ll ask for you not to laugh out loud when you read that. OK yes, when He saved me I was $300,000 in debt with no money and no job and yes, my wife was still having to work full time for us to meet our responsibilities, but I just had to get a job where I could tell people about Jesus every day and I kind of believed that God would somehow make it happen. Clearly, I was also delusional on this point.
But now, God had brought us low so we could see our sin and our separation from Him by smashing our idols and now we were willing to give up whatever else we still had. We put our home on the market and went to Robin’s parents to tell them all that had happened. Without hesitation, they offered their home to us for as long as we needed while we set out to pay off our debts and live for God. God blessed my insurance job and as the money flowed in, we chopped down the debt very quickly. Within a couple of years, we had paid off all of the debt except for about $80,000.
We still had our villa in Anguilla and its market value had grown to $250,000. Anguilla does not offer mortgages and because we had it built with all cash, we owned the unit free and clear. I’m not sure how I really thought about our villa in Anguilla. Did I view that as a way that we could still have a financial “win” in spite of our formerly sinful lifestyle? Only the Lord knows. I also had calculated that we had about $20,000 in rent money being held by our builder friend who was managing the rentals for us and other villa owners. But then, we didn’t. When I asked my friend to pay the annual insurance policy for our villa out of the rent proceeds, he confessed that he had taken all the money. Anguilla had never experienced a strong hurricane in its history, and I couldn’t afford the insurance, so I let it lapse and hoped for the best. Soon thereafter, God sent a hurricane that did severe damage to our villa. My “ace in the hole” was gone. There was nothing else to do but try to sell it. After just several weeks, a native Anguillan who had a business in Brooklyn, N.Y. bought the villa from us for $80,000. Yes, we sold the villa for the same amount as the remaining debt we had yet to pay off. In my pre-Christian days, this would have been cause for great disappointment but now, Robin and I just laughed and rejoiced at both the precision of God and the goodness of God that He would use that hurricane to tell us once again, He was with us and would provide for our every need.
Five years had now passed since my conversion and God had brought us a long way. We were debt free, had purchased a new home, were making good money, and had the joy of serving in our church in several ministries. I had also arrived at a point where I had given up on full time ministry and was striving to be a faithful Christian man while selling business insurance. I had finally become content where God had me and then in a complete surprise, I was approached and offered a job working for Crown Ministries. The irony was not lost on us- Crown Ministry taught churches how to have small group Bible studies about money! I have read a good deal about the attributes of God and believe that there is one attribute that is never taught- God has a great sense of humor! Me teaching about money? Very funny, indeed.
I was so excited about the possibility of joining Crown but there was one thing about the job that took me back for a moment and that was faith funding. Similar to missionaries, faith funding requires the person in ministry to raise their own salaries. I went home and explained this to Robin, and you might have expected her to react with something like, “Great, another brilliant idea.” Yes, she was not in love with the idea, but this time was different. This time, we were trusting God that He would enable us to serve Him. I accepted the job and over the next couple of years, God provided for us in thrilling ways. I loved that ministry and had no intention of leaving, but we would soon see that God was preparing us for something else. Something completely foreign to us. Hope to see you in Chapter 4.
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Last modified: November 8, 2022
