Testify - I saved 418 Dollars or more by switching to Jesus.

So today I went online to just check my bank balance and write a few transactions down and I discover, much to my surprise, a bunch of red ink all over my account. My paycheck had not gone into my account. I checked into it and discovered the last two digits of my account “29” had accidentally been typed “10”. The money was nowhere.

I’d also spent the weekend in Whitesboro messing with my rent house, racking up charges for people to haul away trash, clean carpet, stops for gas, stops for food, and charges to newspapers to put ads showing my property for rent.

All in all, at my last check, thanks to the paycheck not being deposited I had 11 overdraft charges of $38 each.

I had money in savings that would have easily covered it, but, not knowing anything was amiss with my paycheck there was no reason for me to think about moving the funds.

In case you don’t have a calculator handy 11 x 38=$418.

First things first I moved savings over to keep myself from racking up more charges.

Then reality set in. I could have cried. I literally could have just sat down and cried I was so disappointed that something like this would happen when I’d been hoarding my savings so carefully. But as I was driving between my two banks getting money from one to put in the other I remembered that God hadn’t failed me yet. So the money was gone, so Compass "per company policy" might only refund 2 of the 11 charges. So what? God was still in control and God wasn’t going to worry about my savings being gone when He provided for my needs as always. Once I remembered that I let go of the fear and frustration attached to the money and I began praising God. (And by praising God I mean I was singing God the chorus to the oldies song “I love you more today than yesterday” thanks to Eric from work for sending me that song and getting it stuck in my head.

Then I came back to work.

Joe from Compass was on the phone and he wanted me to know that a man with my incorrect account number had come in on Saturday to close his account. Literally, this man showed up and the bank tried to give him my money which had been accidentally deposited into his account. And HE SAID NO. He said it wasn’t his money. He turned down nearly 700 dollars. So the bank had begun investigating the error.

Which also took one less obstacle out of the way as I tried to convince Compass to transfer money from his account to mine. ;)

They’re going through the process to transfer the funds into my account and Joe also says that because of the nature of the error every overdraft fee will be refunded to me.

There is more to the story, but I will tell it in a later post because it veers off from the point of this story. But I just want to add - I'm so thankful I reached the "trusting God" point before I got back to work and the situation changed. It was a strange sense of joy that rushed in as I praised God in the middle of a situation that just STUNK. And God moved on my behalf. I gained favor with every person I talked to. I was blessed. But I found the joy before the miracle. And there seems to be something valuable and necessary in that. Because the joy is in God, not in good situations, not in a lack of problems, not even in money. It's just in God. In the middle of a temporary shortage of over $1100 dollars, I found joy.

It was worth so much more than $1100.