BACK AROUND THIS PAST WINTER, I sat down on the beanbag in my living room and bawled my eyes out for several minutes.

I had been trying and trying to find a job, but everyone was either pretending to hire or just really didn’t need me. I’d had several job interviews, but the verdict was always, “Your hours don’t fit what we need,” or, “We need someone with different experience.” The other companies just ghosted me.

I had a relative gifting me money each month, but without a steadier income the amount in my bank account was getting lower and lower. I kept redoing my budget, trying to eat less, wearing more layers so I didn’t have to run the heater as much, but expenses kept coming. So finally I found myself on the beanbag having a panic attack over the idea of running out of money. 

“I’d better really watch my spending,” I thought, “or I’ll become homeless!” 

Then I thought, well, God is supposed to be able to provide what we need, so why don’t I pray? So I prayed, “Lord, please take away my anxiety and provide me money or a job or whatever it is that will keep me going.” 

 But the money just kept needing to be spent, and the anxiety kept growing. “I must be a poor spender,” I thought, and started asking God to forgive me every time I spent money. Again and again I asked, “Take away my anxiety! Provide what I need!”

Close to Broke

One day I got the notification that there was less than a hundred dollars in my bank account.

The first thing that went through my mind was panic. The second was, “I have no idea what to do.”

And I just started laying it all out. “I’m so worried, and I don’t know how to stop. My circumstances are not looking up, no matter how hard I try. I know God can move mountains and make a tiny bit of olive oil fill a whole village full of jars, but I just can’t believe He can make groceries appear in my kitchen or mysteriously pay off my rent.”

I started apologizing to God, just saying, “Look, I know I should trust you, but I don’t know how. Please help me learn how, or I don’t know what I’ll do.”

So I took a few seconds to breathe before looking at my bank account. And then I sat and cried and panicked for a while.

And the days went by, and I had another panic attack and cried for a while. And I was like, “This trusting in God thing really isn’t working!”

Broke and Blessed

It came in little steps.

I started saying, “I trust You, God,” whenever I felt stressed. I stopped obsessively tracking my spending and instead asked God for discernment whenever I went shopping.  One day I bought something and didn’t feel guilty about it. One day I looked at my bank account and didn’t have a panic attack. One day I was going over my budget and realized I felt excited to have so little money, because I was looking forward to see how God would work it out.

He hadn’t just magically started providing just because I started saying, “I trust You,” or because I was almost broke. I had been asking for a quick fix, something like a million dollars appearing in my bank account, so I would have no reason to worry.

But God led me patiently through and showed me how to trust and be content in all circumstances. I hadn’t needed a magical million dollars before. He had provided for me in ways that felt normal but were really miraculous when I stopped to think. Now that things were different, He provided in different ways.

What I Learned from Anxiety

Anxiety is a lie that shrouds itself in truth. The truth is that, yeah, without money I can’t do a lot of things. The lie is that worrying about that is going to change things. But Psalm 3 says we can lie down and sleep, even if thousands of enemies surround us. God sustains you.

God is always providing for you and taking care of you. It’s easy for me to slip into the idea that a job is just what you have because that’s how society works. It’s easy for me to think, “Well, I just get my food from Aldi’s instead of hunting or praying for my crops to grow, because that’s how the system works.” But in thinking that way, we write God out of the picture, which is honestly a pretty silly thing to do.

If our hope is in the system, we will feel like I did, like we’re not being provided for supernaturally and God isn’t really at work. But if our hope is in God, we see what a miracle it is that we have jobs and grocery stores. We don’t even think about it. 

Feelings are overwhelming, but just because we’re scared doesn’t mean God is. I didn’t know where my food or money was coming from, but I knew He did. You’ll get nowhere by focusing on anxiety, it’ll just get worse. You have to lean into God, even if you don’t feel like it, and trust in His promises even if you don’t believe them yet. The more you focus on what you know is true, the more the anxiety will fade away without you even noticing. 

God works outside the box. I had the idea that I’d get a job and that’s how I’d be provided for. But God took care of me in so many neat ways. When I went on my camping trip, I bought so much food—more than we needed! So for a month afterward I didn’t need a big grocery trip. A few weeks ago I shared about my money problems at church, and afterward a woman came up saying she’d been praying for someone to help her clean out a storeroom, and she’d be happy to pay me for my help.

This isn’t prosperity gospel–the goal isn’t physical riches. We want to be spiritually rich. Keep God’s commandments in your heart. Trust in Him instead of your own opinions. Look to Him in everything you do. Turn away from evil. Recognize that He has given you everything, and give something back to Him. And the Scripture promises you will have peace, you will be refreshed, maybe you even will get rich. But it all starts with focusing God and keeping Him in focus, and that never ends.