(If you didn’t read Part I, click here.)

Little did I know that, in just a few short months, everything I believed about money and how to handle it was going to be tested in the fire.

Ken was called into full-time ministry, and we made plans to move back to our hometown. (More about this decision and its effects in a later post.)

Suddenly his salary was cut in half and I totally lost mine. I won’t go into detail and tell you all of the financial pitfalls we had to dig ourselves out of, or about the struggles we faced returning to one income only. I will say that it wasn’t easy, and our faith was tried more than it had ever been, financially speaking, since we’d married three years before.

And all of this on top of my feeling called to motherhood shortly after our move home? This made for even more of a permanent quizzical look on our faces. “How on earth are we going to pull this off?” we thought. Good thing we didn’t need to — God had it already.

One of Ken’s highest spiritual gifts is faith….and conveniently, it’s one of my very lowest. We’ve been able to see God move and work in our finances since 2003 in ways that we cannot explain. We took initiative…we changed daily habits, established a budget (ugh!) and took a (Dave Ramsey) Financial Peace University class through our church.

We modified our lifestyle and it paid off exceedingly: I am excited to say that as soon as my car is fully paid off, we are debt free.

(Stay tuned for Part III, where I’ll share some of the ways I amended our lifestyle and how I have learned to release money’s control of us over these past few years.)