A Year of Non Profit Tithing by Alli and Jason V.
I love challenges! Whether it is a thirty day challenge, a three month challenge, or even those ever impressive one year challenges, the idea of committing to something long term with growth in mind really excites me.
That is why I am particularly excited to announce this year that I will be participating in a One Year Tithing Challenge. Since there are no guides on this for reference, I will be making it up as I go and documenting my experience.
First, why am I doing this?
My husband and I were one of those types of people that lived paycheck to paycheck and prayed to God for more money.
God in his infinite wisdom had a much better plan.
He brought someone into our life that happened to be giving a class on managing your finances. I’d always paid our bills on time and we had a house and a car so I felt I knew enough to get by, but maybe God had more to teach me. For only $100, the cost of the class, we learned how little we actually knew.
Over the course of the next year we learned about Dave Ramsey’s baby steps and started our Debt Snowball. We paid off $30,000 by cutting back on eating out, buying things we didn’t need, and stepping out of the comparison trap which leads you to believe you need newer cars, bigger houses, etc.
We are on a course to be totally debt free on 1-2 years and we have never had so much extra money each month in our entire life.
And now God came to us with a new challenge. There was a common thread in The Millionaire Theme hour on The Dave Ramsey Show. Every single person who had a million dollars or more net worth mentioned that giving or tithing played a large part in their wealth. God promises directly that if we will trust him in this area he will bless us.
Malachi 3:10 ► “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”
We decided that we will give 10% of our earning to Truth x Vision (some people may decide a church is where God calls them to donate, we just felt led to choose Truth x) and document what happens to us each month!
June 2017
In June we saw a financial uptick to the tune of 37% growth in our salaries due to my sales increasing, that is even before the month is over so it might end up even higher. I work in IT sales and my numbers have always been decent, but all of sudden I am landing $350,000 sales! That is incredible and I can only say that The Lord is entirely faithful in every single thing he says he will do.
My husband is in a new career as well and it seems with his current tempo he may be able to double his salary by the end of the year as well.
There is a certain peace in my heart as well. It was not always easy to give 10%, sometimes I even cringed sending those payments but after doing so I knew I had done what the Lord wanted of us and that filled my heart with such peace.
So that is a tiny update on June. I can’t wait to see what July has in store and I am excited to share with you the results.
July 2017
God blessed us in an entirely different way that we can announce this month. We are now 12 weeks pregnant with our second child.
At first I was a little frustrated with the Lord. We have plans to get out of debt after all and a baby is a sure fire way to incur hospital bills, for us usually to the tune of $7000.
I prayed about it and God reminded me of the large sale he had given us in June. We are more than able to pay for the new baby. Instead of frustration I realized I needed to praise the Lord for his blessing of children.
Psalm 127:3 says “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” My first son is three years old and I cannot express the joy he brings me daily. He is smart, willful, and very funny.
God corrected me so gently by showing me he is bringing more love into our lives and he is doing it because we are faithful.
The peace that comes from knowing that we will be protected and blessed because we are being faithful with our money is a huge testament to how powerful tithing has been in our lives already thus far.
Sure there are times I think, I could have redecorated my house with the money, or gone on a vacation, but God has blessed us so much, I still could do those things!
There is so much extra margin in our month now, we have been able to crush our debt and build an emergency fund. I look forward to what the rest of the year holds!
