The title of this blog would more honestly be… Blessings I Refused to See, but we will go with Hidden Blessings because it sounds less….honest wordy. In my last post I laid bare my soul, revealed that I wasn’t quite lifting my eyes to the Lord, and was letting circumstances blind me to what the Lord was doing. Today I just wanted to share with you one of the blessings I refused to see or at least refused to let my heart believe it was a blessing or miracle from the Lord.
Luke, my husband, has been doing some blogging of his own, you can see his posts and videos here. He is sharing his knowledge about what he has learned with technology, doing podcasts with his friends Russell and Jason, sharing a childhood journal, and most importantly for this post reviewing different items he has purchased. The videos he has made are reviewing things from apps to running shoes to podcast microphones (I think that’s what it is…He is the techie one here) and have become rather popular. Luke being the genius that he is, has made the popularity of the videos profitable to our family by adding Amazon ads to his page and to mine.
If you look on the right side of the page there should be an ad, which if you click on and buy something, we get a percentage of…who knew??? I had Luke put Dave Ramsey as the ad on my page because I truly believe it does help those struggling with debt and it helped and is helping us. So if you are interested in Dave Ramsey feel free to click the ad. Also totally weird and interesting to me, if you are already planning to buy something off Amazon and you go to Amazon through the ad on mine or Luke’s page we will still get a percentage, even if it’s not the thing advertised on my page. Weird and cool right?!?! I’ve always seen advertising on blogs, but I never knew how it worked. So apparently that’s how it works with Amazon… I don’t expect anyone to buy anything by the way or use the link at all, that is not at all why I am writing this, I’m just sharing the process of what Luke and the Lord are doing to bless our family.
Anyway, so Luke has been doing this for a few months and apparently a lot of people are clicking on the ads for whatever he is reviewing and they are buying things. Which has led to income that we did not expect or even image was possible. A surprise blessing/miracle. Luke was just doing the videos for fun and the Lord used it to show His faithfulness and will be blessing us with more money towards paying off student loans! (I say will be blessing because it takes a few months to get the money, because of returns and things like that… Amazon policies… I really have no idea about any of that, but that’s how Luke explained it to me or at least what I remember of his explaining. So I titled this blog hidden blessings because I kinda just refused to even consider the money we were/are making as anything… partially because we weren’t getting it right away and partially because it wasn’t the miracle I was expecting.
One day in particular I was getting a little down because there is so much debt and although we are making progress it wasn’t the progress I had hoped for and so I asked Luke…when do you think the Lord is going to start doing miracles? And he LAUGHED at me! I was sooooo confused and said something along the lines of why in the heck are you laughing at me, which he kindly then explained was because the Lord was clearly doing miracles right at that very moment. I kinda, embarrassingly chuckled at and began to argue how that wasn’t true… silly me…I seem to frequently forget that God’s ways are not my ways (THANKFULLY)!!! Luke then patiently reminded me of the Amazon money and how even though we hadn’t gotten it yet, we would and it was in fact a miracle that people were watching his videos with thousands/millions??? (I honestly have no idea how many videos are on YouTube) of other videos on YouTube. My answer was yeah but… to which Luke wisely said do you really get to decide what is a miracle and what isn’t…Ouch! He was clearly right and I stubbornly hadn’t received God’s faithfulness as being from God at all. All I can say to that is I am so thankful I have Luke to point me back to the Lord when I am so stuck on my own thoughts, ideas, and demands of how the Lord should answer my prayers.
Here is how this is impacting our loan payoffs, the first month Luke did this he made about $60 and I think Luke said it takes 60 days to get paid (these are all rough estimates people) which I believe we got at the end of last month or beginning of this month, which was nice. But every month (about two or three months) since the first month he has made about $500 a month. As you can probably tell an extra $500 a month towards the student loans is very very helpful and such a blessing! We will be getting the first payment of $500 at the end of this month and hopefully we will have very exciting news around the beginning of next month 🙂 Whoo HOO!
Praise the Lord for He is good and FAITHFUL!!! Thank you for your continued support and prayers on this journey.