“It turns out that we’ve been rich all this time, we just didn’t know it.”
TenayBenes.com
Y’all! The Benes Household just closed out June 2023 with a positive number in our bank account! If you’ve been following our Colorado faith story at all, you may know that when I got off of active duty in February 2023, our household income dropped by over 50%. Why? Because we felt God leading us out of a steady, 9-5 job working for someone else and into entrepreneurship. We incorporated Benes Companies as partners and began trying to figure out what exactly God wanted us to pursue.
Feeling Poor
Meanwhile, our bank account kept hitting zero two or three weeks into every month, and we started feeling the pressure of the “not enough”. Going from more-than-enough in the last season to not-enough in this season felt like failure. Even income streams that I would normally have like disability compensation or unemployment were dry. (Trying to work with the Colorado unemployment office has been awful, by the way. I’m close to calling my congressman to ask for help.)
Yet, every time I asked God why we were so poor, God would say, “You’re not poor, you’re broke. There’s a difference.” Then, I would remember that we drive a Tesla, live in a new R-Pod, and eat organic whole foods. If we were poor, we wouldn’t be able to do those things.
Of course, I asked God over and over if we should give up those things in order to make our new budget work, but the answer I kept getting was, “Spend like you have more,” and “Live according to your values”. Well, our values are to be environmentally friendly, to have a clean, well-maintained home, and to eat healthy foods that heal our bodies, so we kept those things.
Making the Shift
Meanwhile, God began speaking to my husband about matching our budget to those values, and he came up with a list of prioritized value categories for our family:
- Food
- Work
- Self- and Family-care
- Housing
- Travel
- Promised
- Convenience
Then, we made a budget with the minimum money each of those categories need to achieve their goal. This meant that we paid ourselves with a spending allowance and a family date allowance before we paid our rent, utilities, car payments, and so on. (“What??? That’s irresponsible,” you say? I thought so, too…)
As a person who was programmed to pay every single bill in full and on time, this felt like sacrilege to me! Then, it felt fear-producing, like, “What about my credit score?” and “What if the people at the bank get mad at me?!” Every time I asked God these questions, I would hear, “I will pay your bills, but in my timing. Until then, trust me.”
That was a hard word to swallow, and I wasn’t actually able to swallow it until the spiritual locust swarm came and started devouring all our resources overnight! It was my out-loud commitment to obeying God in this area that ended this spiritual attack in an instant. What could I do after that, but to follow through on what I said?
By Faith We Spend
That’s why on June 1st, we distributed my first check according to our prioritized values, and we had nothing left past value 4. Then, I got another check that got us through value 6. At the end of the month, we still had $500 left over! That hasn’t happened in four months, people.
That’s just plain amazing!
It was around the time we got through value 6 that my husband said to me, “I don’t know how it happened, but God paid all our bills for this month. I wonder if I have to redefine what being rich means. Is it ‘having a lot of money in the bank’ or is it ‘having as much money as you need, when you need it’?”
Good question! I bet if we defined it the second way, many more people would realize they are rich than they do right now.
It turns out that we’ve been rich all this time, we just didn’t know it.
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