Paid In Full

I've got to tell you, sometimes our bills can be really challenging, especially lately because I have exhausted my unemployment benefits.  Now sometimes this causes more than a little stress in our house!  (We are probably the only ones who get stressed about this, right?)  I have often said, "My father owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and I just need a few of them!"  Maybe that is what I will tell the next creditor who calls?  Wouldn't that be fun?!

You know what would be even more awesome than that?  If the next time I ran out to that beat up old mailbox of ours, it was full of bills.....wait, that isn't the fun part, hold on....and then when I got inside and I tore open every envelope and looked at the bill, and on that line that reads, "Amount Due" someone had stamped in big read block letters, PAID IN FULL!  Now that would be totally worth a  happy dance or two!

I just read a story in Parent magazine where a little girl was playing with her mom's smart phone and unbeknownst to her mom, the daughter reserved a family vacation, to the tune of $5000.  Wouldn't it be awesome if the company not only refunded the money to the mom, but also let the family come ahead on the vacation.  If only, if only!  Has anything like that ever happen to you? When you got a bill in the mail that there was no way you could pay?  Or even worse, a bill you weren't even expecting?

It happen to me once.  Well sort of, here is how it played out.  I was going about my everyday business just living life, and all along I was racking up charges that I couldn't pay.  At first I really had no idea, you know like when you go to the hotel and there are these nice bottles of water sitting there and you think, "Oh how nice, they left us bottled water," except when you go to check out, they charge you $4 each for those nice bottles.

Well, it was kind of like that.   I was just doing my thing, basically I was a good person, you know, "Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, and don't run with boys who do." Well then out of the blue, I am confronted with this huge bill, a bill so gigantic that I could never, ever pay it.  I was certainly in a pickle!

Maybe you have guessed by now that I am not talking about a typical bill, but instead I am talking about sin.  Well once I realized the enormity of this bill, I tried to pay it back little by little, a kind deed here, a helpful hand there, faithful church attendance, but no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. I would like to argue that it doesn't seem quite fair that I was sinning before I even knew it was wrong, and had I known, I may have made a few different choices along the way, but the reality is, even after I knew the truth, I kept right on racking up those charges.

Lucky for me, and you if you are interested, this story has a happy ending!  One day, I stumbled on Romans 6 verse 23, it starts out like this, "For the wages of sin is death..."  Well that got my attention right quick!  Talk about creditors coming...can you imagine what the repo team would look like here?  I guess that is why death is referred to as the "Grim Reaper!"  Anyway, thankfully, the verse does not end there!  It finishes by making this promise, "BUT the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord!"  Now that is the best news ever!  Not only is my debt cancelled out, but it is PAID IN FULL, and I still get the vacation deal, aka, eternal life!  Gotta go, heading outside to do the happy dance in my front yard, want to join me?!

P.S.~If you haven't already consolidated your debts and you want to know how, please email me or comment below! I can't wait to tell you all about it!
shinewomensministry@yahoo.com