Overwhelmed by Financial Fears

A couple of months ago, I had called a church practitioner at Plainfield to ask for some help because I was feeling totally overwhelmed by fear.  We had recently been surprised with a huge tax bill (much bigger than expected), we were dealing with a costly and oddly recurring septic issue at a rental property we own, and we’d recently been asked by extended family members to help financially with a family member’s care costs. To ice the cake, the neighbors next door to our rental home had recently lashed out about a perceived incident with one of our renters (an incident which turned out to be a complete non-issue), but it all just combined to feel really overwhelming, and ugly, like an attack on us. The practitioner assured me that God was in control, was governing, and would take care of it, that God owned all of it.  She asked me to work on handling fear each morning, and to help with that, she recommended I should read Bliss Knapp’s article on the 91st Psalm, as well as finance articles by Bicknell Young and Martha Wilcox, and lastly, Taking Offense by Mary Baker Eddy.

I started to study each one, and several things that I found were really inspiring and started to help untangle that knot of fear. In Bliss Knapp’s article, he notes that our consciousness must dwell with God, meaning I can’t just visit him occasionally!  Dwelling consistently in the “secret place of the most high” keeps that armor of protection around us. It was clear to me that if fear were able to come in so easily and rock my world, then I hadn’t been maintaining my foundation on the rock of God. In Bicknell Young’s article, it said to stop trying to get things (i.e., more money in my case) and instead to see the presence of God. That was helpful to me because the pressure from animal magnetism was to worry about how we were going to get what we needed financially to cover all these things. I also, during that time, read something by Gilbert Carpenter which said: “It is through the humanly unsolvable problem that man is forced to turn to demonstration, and to the development of spiritual sense.”  So, that was telling me that this was a catalyst for me to learn to trust God’s disposal of events.

Well, working with these spiritual truths really helped untangle these knots of fear I was feeling and I just felt myself starting to let it go, and lo and behold for each issue, an idea came that helped sort each one out: For the tax issue, I was inspired to call a former work colleague of mine who was a accounting professional and he gave me some suggestions for ways to reduce the tax burden that our accountant hadn’t thought about. While it didn’t eliminate the issue, it ended up taking a decent bite out of the overall number, making it more manageable. My husband was inspired to take certain steps regarding the situation with the family member, which has helped harmonize that situation, and our daughter, who we’ve been helping financially, has seen some good growth in her job and has been able to cover more expenses on her own, freeing up resources to use for this other family member. For the issue with the septic, we were led to a plumber in a neighboring town from where our rental house was, and he knew a septic person in that town, and that person proved to be extremely knowledgeable and capable, an absolute gem who fixed the issue.  We were able to get the renters’ insurance on the vacation home to cover the costs, even though it initially was unclear if it would or not.

The situation with the neighbors, which had really gotten under my skin because it was so oddly aggressive and out of the blue, I realized its purpose was to undermine the growth I’d experienced praying about the situation we’d had with these neighbors in the past. What Mary Baker Eddy says in the article called “Taking Offense” really helped. She writes: “To punish ourselves for others’ faults, is superlative folly. The mental arrow shot from another’s bow is practically harmless, unless our own thought barbs it. It is our pride that makes another’s criticism rankle, our self-will that makes another’s deed offensive, our egotism that feels hurt by another’s self-assertion. Well may we feel wounded by our own faults; but we can hardly afford to be miserable for the faults of others.” This really helped me simmer down and stop ruminating about their unpleasantness. I realized I couldn’t let my thought barb their words or actions, and I really liked the idea of not letting myself be miserable for a fault that was squarely theirs. I’m very grateful for how a deeper understanding of God and reliance on God and his care helps untangle knots that seem hopelessly tight, and I’m very grateful for the elimination of the fear that was keeping me up at night with worry about these situations. I am very grateful to Mary Baker Eddy for giving us this Science that meets every need, and to be a part of this church, and to be able to work with such wonderful practitioners.