The Wonders of Tithing

So, this really happened a while ago. Like 3 weeks or more. I'm so good at this game... Anyway, Tuition kind of caught me off guard this year. Normally I'm working and saving and working and saving and working and saving and end up with about 600 dollars left in savings after tuition. However, this year for whatever reason, I was a good 700 dollars short the week before my tuition payment was due. I had no idea how I was going to pay it! It was one of the more stressful experiences of my life.

I walked into this semester knowing only 2 things for sure. Those were that the Lord wanted me in school at the University of Utah, and that I needed to focus on my studies and learn all I could. It's interesting how contradictory the two can be at times. Really, it's all just a learning experience all around. You have to learn to balance your life. It takes money to pay for school, and you need to work to earn money. It takes time to work, but it also takes time to study. If you work too much you can afford to pay for school, but you fail all your classes making school, in essence, a grand waste of money. If you study too much, you start out getting good grades, but then the university drops all your courses, and you've just spent time studying something and gaining merely knowledge. Knowledge is good to gain, however, if you're in it for a degree, knowledge doesn't cut it. You need credits and grades.

Basically, I spent the first couple of months of the semester trying to achieve this happy balance. Truth be told, I have yet to succeed, but I do believe that I was, for the most part, trying as hard as I could. I like to think that a good 90 percent of the time at least I was giving my all. I don't know so much if it had anything to do with what I did, or if the Lord really just decided it was time to tell me how much he loved me, but either way, I couldn't be more grateful.

As I said before, it got to the point where my tuition was due in 7 days, and I was still 700 dollars short. I had no idea what I could possibly do. The only thing I could think of was to fall to my knees. I cried several times because I was so stressed and I had no idea how on earth I was going to come up with the money. Pay day came 9 days before tuition was due. When I picked up my paycheck, it totaled about 300 dollars. I thought to myself how wonderful that was, and then I realized that I was still 450 rather than 400 because I had to pay my tithing. Surely the Lord wouldn't ask me to give up my schooling just to pay my tithing, I thought. Well, actually, he would. Did He not give me my talents? Does He not give me everything wonderful in my life? If the answers to those two questions are yes, and I assure you that they are, then it also must follow that He has the right to ask anything of me in return.

The Lord will teach us lessons in whatever way He sees fit. He had already taken away my schooling for a short time once to teach me the wonders of humility and self-reliance at the same time. It was possible that I had simply not learned my lesson. I haven't, I am sure, learned it to the extent I should to become perfect in those areas, however it seems my progress was sufficient to grant me the right to continue in my education because The Saturday before I had to pay, I got a phone call asking me to take a Waiter shift for one of my coworkers. Of course I picked up the shift. I needed all the cash I could get, however insignificant it may have seemed. It wasn't terribly busy that day, and I was very worried about my earnings. I earned 120 dollars in tips that day. I now only needed 330 dollars.

The next week followed that same precedent. Two coworkers fell sick one day after the other, and asked me to take their shifts. I had, by the day before I needed to pay my tuition earned all but 80 dollars of what I owed to my school. I got to work that night, and was surprised to see that, rather than grilling, I was a server yet again. I had checked the schedule a million times, and I was absolutely certain that I was grilling. I have yet to decide if that was the Lord showing me His hand, or me just being completely oblivious to my own work schedule. Perhaps it was the former through my own obliviousness. However, the point remains that I waslked away from that shift with 92 dollars.

The second I realized I had made all I needed, I started to cry. I had been sure it was impossible, and was simply leaning on my Saviour to pull me through the hard times that were certain to come. With God, all things are possible. He gives us commandments for our benefit and growth. I shudder to think what would have happened had I witheld my tithing. I could have possibly saved a couple people from losing their lunches, I suppose.

I am so grateful for the law of tithing. It allows our Heavenly Father to bless us in ways that he could not were we to not abide by it. I know that because I gave my bishop my tithing rather than keep it to myself, I was able to pay my 3000 dollar bill. I have also learned from this experience that I can always rely on the Lord. He will always be there to give me what I need, so long as I do my part and strive to be more like Christ.