Day 310 - A five-letter word and an update

I went back to my notes from church yesterday and picked out all the parts that had the word faith in them and then made my own notes.

Faith is useless if you don't do something with it.
Faith is visible when you witness to unbelievers.
You show faith by helping other people and encouraging fellowship.
Being generous proves your faith.

Faith really means so many things. It is your beliefs and feelings, it is action and it describes who you are. At the same time faith is what is unseen in your heart and it also a highly visible representation of who you are. I never understood before that you simply cannot have faith and only have one of those, it must be both. It must be a driving force in your personal life and a loving force in your public life. Faith is all encompassing. It is amazing how much a small five-letter word has impacted my life.

Life is changing for us slowly, but changing nonetheless, and for the better! We were able to take our kids out to eat Friday night at a restaurant and pay for it ourselves for the first time in many months (I cannot tell you how many times I used to take this for granted). It felt really good. We are also starting to have enough money that we can make a basic budget and have money set aside for food, gas, and extra expenses. We have been living penny to penny this last year; so being able to have money to go to the grocery store was amazing. It makes me grateful again to all the people who carried us through with gift cards and help. I honestly don't know where we would be right now without all of you. We made it because of you. And now being able to fend for ourselves it a really great feeling. Everything is very slow, but I feel like we have concrete hope that each month will get better. God is teaching us extreme patience and I am so grateful for every step that we are taking in the right direction. I used to beg God for any relief and now we are starting to feel it.