The Blessings of Paying Tithing
I had been tidying my house, but I couldn’t even vacuum the floors and dust my furniture, because I had so much clutter laying around. God’s house is a house of order (D&C 132:8), and I needed to make mine that way too. A wonderful thing happened to me in the process of tidying my house – I found some “hidden” treasures. Most of us are familiar with the story in the New Testament about looking for a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10). Today, I was looking for my original birth certificate that I needed for applying for a free bus pass.
In the process of looking I found lots of other surprises, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find my birth certificate. I knew that I had originally put it into the top drawer of my filing cabinet in a light brown money belt; but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I looked through all the other file cabinet drawers, to no avail. The other drawers were filled with old bank statements, car repair bills, pay-cheques, house and car insurance documents, etc., but there was no birth certificate to be found anywhere.
Finally, after spending an hour searching, I prayed for help from Heavenly Father to find the lost document. I felt (through the Holy Ghost) that my birth certificate was indeed in the top drawer of my filing cabinet. So, I went back to the drawer and looked through all the piles of papers again. Imagine my surprise when I got down to the very bottom of the drawer and found my birth certificate in a blue pouch. That was when I remembered that I had changed where I stored my birth certificate about two years ago. I’m so glad that the Holy Ghost remembered where my birth certificate was.
But the story doesn’t end there. While delving into the bottom of my filing cabinet drawers, I also found 3 crisp, new, £20 notes, which were sitting among a pile of credit card receipts. Once I found the money, I remembered that I had put them there for safekeeping about a year ago. It was a lovely surprise to find them today. Yesterday I also found some money unexpectedly, as I was cleaning out my handbag. I found a small wallet that I hadn’t used for about two years and when I opened it, I found two £10 notes inside!
I also looked in my filing cabinet for my cheque book, because I wanted to attend tithing settlement on Sunday. I needed to write out a cheque for some extra tithing that I owed. I couldn’t remember the last time that I wrote a cheque for anything, so I had no idea where my cheque book was. When I eventually found it, I looked at the cheque stubs and saw that the last cheque that I had written was four years ago. It’s no wonder that the banks want to “phase” cheques out, because very few people use them anymore. The only thing that I used a cheque for in the past was to pay my tithing every month. Now that I pay my tithing using a standing order from my bank, I have no need to use cheques anymore. Once I had found my cheque book, I wrote out a cheque for the outstanding tithing that I owed this year and put it into my handbag.
On the way home from submitting my bus pass application, I thought to myself: “I should stop and say hello to Jan and Steve.” I hadn’t seen these friends for about two years because they had moved to a new house. Once I found the house, I knocked on the door and Jan opened it. She was in the middle of vacuuming and cleaning when I arrived unannounced and she was standing beside an ottoman in the kitchen. As we talked she said, “We have been in a big mess for a year, but we are finally getting things the way we want them now. I’m getting rid of this ottoman, would you like it?”
"Yes please," I replied.
What Jan didn’t know, was that I had been looking for an ottoman like this for about six months. I had even gone into three charity shops that day, looking for such an item, but I couldn’t find one. But the Holy Ghost knew exactly where a used ottoman was, and he prompted me to go to Jan’s new house, because that was the day that she was throwing one away.
Isn’t Heavenly Father kind to us? On the day that I wrote out a cheque for extra tithing, I found money and was given furniture equal to the exact amount that I had written out my tithing cheque for. I had read about these types of stories in the Ensign before, but it had never happened to me, until that day.