My name is Micah Bumbaugh and I am 32 years old. My wife, Michelle (30) and our 2 kids, Ava (5) and Christian (4) live in south-central PA. We’ve been married for 9 years. We listen to your radio show on WCRH 90.5 out of Williamsport, MD. Recently, you asked for anyone to write and tell you about how God has helped you through the current economy. Well, we have such a story. God has been so good, it will be hard to find a concise way to tell it. I’ll try to just hit the highlights.
I lost my job on January 6, 2011. I’m a physical therapist assistant and work mainly in nursing homes. Due to recent changes in Medicare reimbursement for therapy, I have found it difficult to find a new job. I was able to find anywhere from 8-15 hours a week, but nothing consistent. I’m also drawing partial unemployment.
Around the middle of January (about 2 weeks after losing my job), I felt the Lord asking us to give 20%, instead of our usual 10%. We’ve always been faithful tithers and God has come through for us, financially, countless times in our marriage. So this wasn’t such a foreign idea, but I just wasn’t sure how to feel about it. I know we can’t outgive God, but I was still uneasy about it. Well about 2 days later, Michelle came to me and said that she also felt the Lord had spoken to her about the exact same thing!! So it was confirmed that that was what we were to do. So we gave 20% for the month of January.
About 2 weeks later, I went to get our taxes done. And our return was considerably larger than normal years. God literally gave the extra 10% right back and then some!! And during this time, we’ve not fallen behind on any payments and even still have a small surplus for emergency expenses. Only God could do this.
I have really enjoyed these last few months with my family. And to be completely honest, we’ve not really been stressed at all. We’ve spent a lot of time together and my kids do not want me to return to work!! We’ve had several people tell us “we can’t believe how calm you are about this whole thing”. We’ve taken that as a huge compliment. When you trust “do not worry about what you will eat or drink, where you will sleep, what you will wear”, you can live in peace no matter what the situation. So we have chosen to enjoy this time. Ava starts kindergarten in the fall, so we can’t think of a better time for this to happen to us. They are only this little once. So I’m trying to cherish every moment. But without God’s peace, I couldn’t do that. And I’m so blessed to have a wife who is on board with this peace as well. Her not being stressed has been a huge encouragement to me.
At the beginning of May I received a call for a 13 week traveling assignment, beginning May 31, ending Sept 2. The commute is about an hour and 10 mins each way, but the pay is really good. At least I’ll have full time work for the summer. I don’t know what Sept 3 holds, but God does. So He’ll take us across that bridge then.
Now I want to back up a little. Because the story above is a culmination of literally years of God proving Himself to us. Without this history, we could not have enjoyed my time off. So I’d like to share with you my personal money testimony.
Throughout my teen years and into my mid 20s, I struggled mightily with the love of money and it caused me to get angry a lot with Michelle and cause strife in our marriage (mainly due to our different spending habits). About 2 years into our marriage, the Lord broke me of the love of money.
At the time, my mother-in-law was part of a prayer ministry that served to pray for people for physical and emotional healings. They met every Thursday evening. I was diagnosed with Scoriatic arthritis when I was 14 and had lived since then in a good bit of daily pain. So they were going to pray for my physical healing.
The week before they prayed for me, my wife went to the Thursday evening meeting with her mom (without me). Prior to this particular evening, my mother-in-law spoke to one of her prayer partners, Jim, and told him that I wanted to get prayer for physical healing from arthritis (she didn’t tell him anything else about me). She asked him to begin praying to see if God would direct him with any discernment for me. At the end of the evening, Jim came over to my wife and gave her a pamphlet. He told her that there was something in this pamphlet that the Lord wanted me to hear. And if I didn’t get control of this area of my life, he felt God said 2 things would happen: 1) I would be in more physical pain than I could stand, and 2) God said He would lift His hand of protection over me.
So she came home and gave it to me. I opened the pamphlet and the first word was “money”. The entire pamphlet was about the love of money. Only God could have told Jim this about me. Michelle and I prayed together on the spot and asked God to free me from this burden. And this was one time when God said an outright yes to one of my prayers. It was a process to let it go completely, but there was a significant amount of immediate freedom.
We had Ava about 2 years later. Michelle’s life-long dream was to be a homemaker and mother. So she quit work when she was 8 months pregnant and has never returned to work. It doesn’t make (worldly) sense to cut your income in half and have your expenses go up. But God is bigger than the world. I can’t tell you how many times He has intervened in our finances. God put me in positions at work where there were places for advancement and I was promoted into a management position. Within a few years, I was making almost as much as we were with 2 incomes!! Only God could have done that. And it wasn’t always easy, but we always had peace. There were months when we only had a few dollars to our name, but all our bills were paid and we had a place to live and food to eat and most importantly, each other.
At this point, we’re continuing to take it one day at a time. We have peace that no matter what comes our way, God already has it taken care of.
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