The Windows Of Heaven Have Opened Again

Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. Malachi 3:10

This is an old story with lots of happy endings. I will begin by affirming that I have tested this passage of scripture and found it to be on the mark in every case. The most recent dramatic example occurred just the other day.

As many of you know, I have reached the end of my forty year law enforcement career. As we move into retirement, we want to sell our home and move to Kentucky. There are many reasons but one of the most important is that we can’t stay where we are without having to continue making house payments. By selling and moving, we get a nicer home and no house payment because property is much less expensive in Kentucky. This will enable us to move into retirement owing nothing to anyone for any reason.

A related story began about five years with a program called the Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP). With this program, police officers have the option of retiring but remaining on the job for up to five years. Retirement technically began for me on September 1st, 2003. From then until now, all of my retirement pay was placed in an account similar to a Deferred Compensation Account with a guaranteed 5% interest. In the meantime I have continued working and collecting a regular salary. All retirement benefits, however, are based on a retirement in 2003.

As one might imagine, the amount of money from my pension pay checks that have accumulated untouched for five years with 5% interest compounded monthly is beginning to add up to a sizeable sum. This is one of the reasons why we won’t owe anybody anything after retirement. The problem is, we never paid any tithing on the money since we never saw it or had access to it.

A few months ago, we realized that we were going to face a tithing check well into five figures and we sort of wished we wouldn’t have to do that. And for a while now we have continued sort of wishing that we could somehow avoid that.

When we actually put the house up for sale, it didn’t take long to get an offer that we decided to accept, but things started going sideways pretty quickly. The buyer’s inspector was the inspector from hell and enough doubts were raised that the woman buyer eventually believed she had to back out.

This happened last Saturday, June 14. Cathy was upset and so was I. Back to square one.

Except! I had been thinking for several days that there was really no way to avoid paying tithing and still be an honorable person. So on Saturday afternoon I broached the subject with Cathy. As it turns out she had been having similar thoughts and after a pretty short conversation, and realizing that we might have to scale back our plans somewhat, we decided we would pay tithing.

That day, realtors showed the house three times and the following day while we were at church, the house was shown four more times. Later that afternoon as we were out for a walk, we were notified by our realtor that we had a new offer for full price. The offer that had fallen through was substantially less.

These buyers have more money down, they are married (the first couple wasn’t), and Cathy and I feel that this process is moving forward with approval from on High.

While the amount offered is nowhere near enough to cover the tithing check, other benefits are accruing and little but important things are falling into place.

To anyone reading this I emphatically aver that I am positive that the good things happening to us now are based solely on our decision to do the right thing about tithing.