“How much money do we have?” my son asked at dinner one night.
“We always have enough for what we need,” my husband gently responds.
In a world that feels like it continually gets more expensive to live in—the majority of us will not go to bed hungry, we will wake up in a bed, we have cars to drive and money to fill them with gas. We don’t worry about where our next meal will come from and when we turn on the water faucet, it runs clear and safe to drink. We are a people that are very wealthy in many ways—it’s just the grind of everyday life fogs our view of that provision. We all have valid and real weights that feel suffocating and too heavy to bear some days—and a lot of the time that has to do with our finances.
So here’s my offering to you today—a gentle prayer from the book “Every Moment Holy” that invites us into the holiness and presence of God as we do the often overwhelming, yet mundane task of paying our bills.
This prayer offers us the slowness to pause as we check a bill off of our to-do list, notice the presence of God, and listen for the whispers of His provision—perhaps in surprising ways.
As a ministry worker, my family lives on full support of others who follow the promptings of generosity by the Holy Spirit. I know firsthand what it is like to pray for provision and see the hand of God move and work—sometimes it’s in the form of a surprise check in the mail, but most of the time it’s in the wisdom of stewarding what He has already given us.
All of what we have is His. May we so graciously and freely offer it back to Him—even if it feels as mundane as paying the electricity.
A Liturgy for the Paying of the Bills
Leader: O God Who Does Provide All Things Necessary for Our Lives
People: Be present with us now, in the paying of these bills.
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For there is little in this life that will so starkly reveal our insecurities and our struggle to trust your tender care as will the state of our hearts when we consider the state of our finances—When we are anxious about money, O Lord, we can slip so easily in the downward spiral of believing that simply having more of it would guarantee our security.
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As if our security could ever rest anywhere outside of you, O God. So guard our hearts against that lie. Let us learn to view money and all material things as an arena in which to learn and practice a more faithful stewardship, and as a means by which to invest in things eternal–but never as ends in themselves.
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Where we have mismanaged your provision, where we have stumbled in our stewardship and our undoing has been our own doing, where we have through the workings of our own desires unwisely accrued expenses and debt, grant us conviction, and vision, and better wisdom, that we would more faithfully steward these resources in months to come.
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But where we are merely beset by the common and inescapable expenses of faithfully tending the many needs within our spheres of responsibility, give us peace and, O Lord, give us even joy, to see as we allocate these funds for the paying of necessary bills, how you have faithfully provided the means by which to pay them. And if we have enough to do that, let us practice contentment in what you have provided.
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And if we have more than enough to do that, then teach us what it would mean to begin to live more generously towards those whose needs are greater than our own.
For we have you, and in having you we have all things,
and month-to-month you are teaching us—in this paying of bills—the slow vocation of trust.
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Do not abandon us to our anxieties over finances, O Lord, but use those worries to turn our hearts and thoughts to you—then teach us both a greater contentment and a greater confidence in your constant care.
Amen.
Substack always offers their writers the option to open up for paid subscriptions. I know many writers on this platform offer this to their subscribers, but for me, I hope to always keep what I offer here in this space free of charge. My husband and I already serve in support-based missions work in diaspora ministry, specifically in refugee care. If you want to support my writing—you could give a one-time or recurring donation to our ministry and that would be a huge blessing.
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