I guess there's only one way to know whether you're doing the right thing and following the right path as directed by God. You get attacked. I'm not into this karma thing where you have something good happen to you and someone elsewhere in the world has something bad happen to them. I remember an advert for a yoghurt or similar where everytime someone would have a spoonful of 'pleasure' you'd see some other mug getting the 'pain' side of it. Anyway, I don't believe in that. What I do believe is that you are attacked by the devil as soon as he realises that God's motivated you to work for His glory.
So I'm guessing that what we did yesterday must have been the right thing to do because I've woken up today with tonsils the size of table tennis balls! I don't usually attribute every bad thing to the devils evil trickster ways, but I do today because of yesterday......

THE TALE OF YESTERDAY

Ok so, a tiny bit of background might help here, just in case this blog is ever stumbled across by someone other than me. During our engagement I was living with my mum back in Luton and claiming Job Seekers Allowance as I didn't have a job although I was toying with the idea of setting up a wedding shoe shop online. The obvious reasons there are I love shoes and there's a good profit in anything to do with weddings. Just add the word wedding and it adds at least a tenner onto the price!
Anyway, I digress, so Dus was living and working in Central London in a good, well paid job and came up to Luton every weekend where my mum would put him up and feed him and exclaim that he wasn't eating properly during the week.
When we got engaged, it was the result of a church service gone good. Dus had come to visit me in Wales where I was preparing to move out of as I just couldn't afford to live on my own here anymore so was giving up and moving back to mums. Whilst there for the weekend, Dus came to my church with me and felt the same powerful calling that I had a few months earlier (and was despairing about how I could continue with from Luton!) and decided that the right thing to do was to get married and come back to Wales to work with the church here to set up some youth programmes.
The whole six months we were engaged and living in Luton and London, we knew that when we moved back to Wales, we'd have no way of supporting ourselves. I guess that's what's called a 'leap of faith'. Let me tell you, it's so easy to take a leap of faith until that leap of faith is lasting 6 months and you STILL don't know the plan after that 6 months!
Well, December came and Dus resigned, January came and we moved to Wales (me into our lovely new house and Dus into the Pastor's house- poor pastor) and then got married. We still had no jobs. January turned into February, February turned into March and we're still no nearer to having a way to support ourselves long term.
Last week Dus had an idea. He thought to himself, 'why are we sitting here waiting on interviews when we both have skills that we can put to work for ourselves?'. So we prayed, and waited, and chatted about it with our friends at church, then plundered our self employed friend from church's knowledge. Then we decided, why not, let's give it a go and see if this is what's going to support us. God can't make it work for us, if we're not open to it working.
To cut a long and boringly domestic story short, we already had a workspace in our spare room but were sat one upstairs, one downstairs working apart from each other getting a bit down in the dumps. So we prayed, checked gumtree, and 'lo and behold, the very same desk we'd originally wanted but hadn't bought because it was too expensive, was listed for £25! We then found a second hand office chair (snazzy deep green) for £15....things were looking up!
We travelled the distance to Cardiff yesterday, to part with what we thought was a reasonable sum of money for a perfectly good desk and chair to work at and came back feeling really rather chuffed with ourselves.
Dus set to assembling it all in his man warrior way while I prepared a lovely wholesome meal for my hunter/gatherer and pretty soon the 'office' was ready!
When I say ready, I mean ready to be filled with pink fluffy pens, a snazzy mousemat, a gorgeously decorated pen pot...all things that I shall enjoy hunting for!
Dus had thoughtfully brought my DAB radio in so that I could listen to my favoured UCB inspirational while I worked, and organised some storage for my bits and bobs so I was joyful and looking forward to starting work properly today on my business.

Today I woke up feeling that my throat had become coated in razor blades and tiny dwarfs were following me around applying needles to my poor sensitive skin. How they reached my head to inflict their pain there, I have no idea, but they have.

So, I'm not disheartened; I'm overjoyed. For the first time in a long time I've started making sales again, and although I'm by no means rich, I've already made back what we spent on the office equipment. We've both been filled with an excitement that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're doing...who could be overjoyed by claiming benefits hoping they'll cover the rent. We've been filled with compassion for the young people we wish to be serving, we've been struck with anticipation for what God will achieve in our small village of Cwmaman, and most of all, we're so thankful that we are cradled in His hand.

In my daily book by Max Lucado I read about the passage Matthew 6, which incidentally was read for us at our wedding by the most encouraging man I've ever met and someone I feel proud to call my friend. Max went a little deeper into not worrying about tomorrow. We all know the passage, but we don't always follow it willingly. Why worry about tomorrow? Tomorrow will look after itself. Of course we don't have the wisdom yet to deal with tomorrow, we will have the wisdom tomorrow. We don't have the knowledge that we need yet, because we don't need to know it yet. As long as I know what I'm meant to be doing today, we should be ok and on track. It's slightly harder to consign my diary to the back of the drawer yet though!

On a slightly different note, we saw some lovely bright yellow Crocuses (Croci?) whilst we were out and about on Monday. How cheerful they are. Sometimes I think we're too lazy to see God's beauty so sometimes He just makes it obvious for us! Thank you Lord for holding me in your hands when I'm so self focussed I can't even see the beauty of your creation!