We didn’t always have a plan for our finances. A few years ago I hadn’t even heard of the word stewardship. We had no idea where our money was going. We just knew we were stressed out living paycheck to paycheck.

After a few failed attempts to make a change, we were prepared to give up. Convinced that it would always be this way and fully believing the myth that we would “always have a car payment.” Our checking account had auto-drafted out of savings a few times in the last several months. We wanted to save money but couldn’t seem to find any extra change to set aside. And then our church treasurer handed me our tithing records from the previous year…and my heart sank. The number was so much less than I had expected. Had we really been so careless? We thought we were being generous but we were really just spending recklessly. If we weren’t tithing and we were still barely making ends meet at the end of the month, how were we supposed to turn this around?

Out of these hard times came the motivation and determination we could never seem to grasp before. We had all these yucky feelings towards money in the past and it was all hush-hush conversation. Until we began looking at God’s view of money and realized that money is actually a tool that can be used to build God’s kingdom. We just weren’t following the plan for this tool, but that was something we could change.

We got a plan. We got a budget. And we worked at it with focused intensity. The load got a little lighter. We could breath again. So we worked at it some more. And the load got a little lighter. And we could breath a little more. As we walked towards freedom we started realizing that people around us were living in the same kind of bondage we were. Everyone’s story looks different, but we all feel the weight of the burdens. That’s when we knew that the knowledge we had gained and our personal story were meant to be shared.

And so we started this blog.

Thanks for taking the time to read our story. We hope to be a light in the darkness and to show people that there is hope no matter what your financial situation looks like.

Jess & Ryan

March 17, 2019