Financing?
12/28/2006
Who is really paying for your travels? Because you are practically traveling around the world! And you have to spend serious money in these travels. So I’m curious: who is the one financing these travels?
God provides : )
Through whom? It doesn’t fall from heaven, you know.
It kind of does. There have been three times in the last few years we’ve been all the way around the world and made several stops. This is the third one. All three times were very different in terms of how they happened. Never at any of those times did anyone in any other place in the world ever pay a penny for it, nor would we let them. Paul said that his desire was to be able to proclaim Jesus free of charge. Even in the United States, when we travel from city to city and state to state at people’s request, there have been times when they’ve passed around a hat and put lots of money in it, and we just gave it back and said, “Give it to the poor.” We don’t want anything to do with extracting money from anyone. All the books are always free, and have been for twenty years.
So, who pays for it all? I don’t know. Like I said, we don’t have anybody that’s wealthy, but when there are enough people who have decided, “You guys need to go answer some of these letters and be with people on the other side of the world who have asked for visits. You guys need to go.” We just sort of make it known that this is a possibility. If this is something that you think God wants to happen—it’s just like the other things we’ve talked about—then you can write on an envelope that this is for travels for these brothers and then throw it in the box, and if there’s enough to travel, we travel. And if there’s not, we don’t. If God’s not in it, we don’t go. If God is in it, then we have to go even if we don’t want to.
Sometimes what will happen is a brother will have the kind of job where he gets a regular salary, and then if a particular project works out really well he’ll get a big bonus at the end of the year. There are various things like that where there will suddenly be a big lump sum of cash and they will feel as if God wants them to help send other people out. God can provide in a lot of different ways, and it’s never in the way we would think. But we don’t have anyone who’s wealthy, so it’s always a sacrifice in a lot of ways to do things like this.
Wow : )
I have zero dollars in a savings account, and almost zero dollars in a checking account. I’m poor, right? We’re all poor, pretty much, so it’s just how God provides—sometimes in different ways than we would expect—and we do what we have to do.