What Taxes Taught Me

My husband has been self employed for 13+ years.

Last weekend, my husband put all our tax info together to submit it to our accountant. I, for the first time in his self-employed years, put a great deal of tax information together. Detailed. Itemized. Extensive. I thought I did a great job!

However, the information that I gave to my husband only frustrated him. I had given him a monthly breakdown of what he wanted, but he needed more details and less details.

He needed break downs in one category here and less detail in another there. And as he explained this HUGE dilemma to me, things started heating up.Fortunately, with a spreadsheet program, it is simple to bring up the information or total up needed information simply by using a formula and copying it from column to column.

But that’s not what my husband saw.

Nope. He saw a sheet of paper sitting in front of him with information that to him was quite limited and unusable. No matter what I did to explain to him that the information he needed was all in the computer and just a few moments away, he was frustrated! From his point of view and limited understanding of all the information that had been meticulously inputted, he was quite certain that he would have to spend the whole ENTIRE day figuring out the information the way he always did. (Because he felt I didn’t do it correctly).

Let me just say the conflict was palpable. (Conflict, mind you, not contention).

Throughout the rest of the day I reflected upon this circumstance. I realized that my husband examining his one sheet of really good information and me seeing the entire spreadsheet and knowing the crucial formulas is a lot like my relationship to God. It wasn’t like my husband had to go manually find his information that would have taken an entire day . . . all he had to do was ask.

Because the information and the formulas were already there.

I recognized there have been so many times in my life that my view of the whole picture is so limited, no matter how careful the details in front of me and unfortunately, I’ve thrown a tantrum letting God know that He really didn’t give me all the information I needed; that I really I didn’t know any better what I needed to know; and that His answer, well, His answer really wasn’t the right one.

This little weekend experience made it certain to me that God is in the details, and instead of being frustrated that I can't see His whole picture, I should take a big breath and ASK!

“Prayer is the act by which the will of the Father and the will of the child are brought into correspondence with each other. The object of prayer is not to change the will of God but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant but that are made conditional on our asking for them.”