I am not a big prosperity preacher kind of guy, but today I
think of Romans 8:28, which is the cornerstone of prosperity preaching:
And we know that for those who love
God all things work together for good, for those who are called
according to his purpose.
What exactly does Paul mean when he writes these words?
Today we expect God to be a genie to produce the promises of this verse. But in
the trenches we also tend to mock it from time to time. When calamity falls and
our chips are down we tend to wonder how any GOOD can come from the current
melee. Back to our story and what happened.
In fall of 2006 the shop was and about that same time we got
a sizable offer on our property. All things were working together for good in
this case. The sale would have meant our debt was clear and we could maintain
our business and own the building we were in (at least part of it since we
would have a sizable mortgage attached. So all was good, God was working
miracles.
This story could go all the way back to how we purchased
this land or how the shop had saved the family from a long term layoff, but I
will just focus on more recent “history”. Anyway all looked good, the city was
excited and zoning should be a breeze, then the zoning meeting happened.
What no one expected was the neighbor’s response, the
meeting was packed out with angry residents. They complained, yelled and even
cried before the council against the project. With such a large complaining contingent
the council caved and rejected the zoning. Since the contract for the property
was contingent on zoning being approved, the deal fell through and we were in
trouble.
Well then fall 2007 happened! Our shop was humming along in
debt but able to maintain the overhead and make money. September of 2007 we saw
a precipitous drop in sales which never recovered. December of 2008 we were
over $175k in credit card debt alone and almost $575k in total debt from risky
real estate deals. From this we were in the office of a bankruptcy attorney
trying to figure out the easy way.
We did not see any good here. The land deal fell through,
the shop was toast and we were trying to get out of debt through bankruptcy.
The lawyer actually advised against it and suggested we do something else! I
was given the Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover for Christmas, this along with
a new job gave us a long difficult road to getting out of debt, but we bit the
bullet and started.
Our view from the trenches was anything but good from everything that happened.