Who Supplies Your Needs?

In the journey we have been traveling lately, God has taken my comfort zones away and exposed areas where I have been getting too comfortable. Like most Americans, I had grown accustomed to the regular influx of money that happened every week when my husband got his pay check. I would thank God for providing the job and for providing my husband with the abilities to work- but lets face it, Danny did *work* for it after all so its not like we didn't have some sort of hand in the outcome. I had something inside of me that really liked the dependability of that steady paycheck. Having it at such a regularity kind of got me off of depending on God for everything and started me into thinking that we had more to do with our financial stability then we really did.
Fast forward to July of 2007. My husband has not worked at all since last June- prior to that he hadn't worked more then a day or two a week since November of 2005. In October of last year they stopped his worker's compensation check. For the past eight months we have been surviving off of what God has brought us as He decided we needed it. Can I tell you how we have survived? No, but we have. When the car needed a repair (on two separate occasions) money was handed to us from an anonymous giver through our church. Many times God has brought in something when we had need of it, but that is a different post, the point for now is my focus had drifted off of our real provider and onto those who seemed to be providing- my husband and his employer.
In the end of the first chapter of Habakkuk, the prophet was lamenting about how the wicked were prospering in their oppression of others. They then went and placed the reason for their success on their instruments of war. Habakkuk took it into a bit of symbolism and stated that men were like fish and the wicked just scooped them up in their nets. "Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous." (KJV) The wicked men were so far from where they should have been that they were erroneously placing the reason for their success on their instruments (nets) going so far as to say the whole reason they were pulling in so much plunder (portion and meat) is all due to their instruments of war.
Although I don't feel that I had been by any means looking to Dan and his employer as the sole reason we were financially stable, I can see how I was not totally relying on God and recognizing Him as the one from whom we get everything. As the verse in Acts says, "For in him we live, and move, and have our being; (17:28). Everything we have is from God- down to our very breath. To place any responsibility for any of it on anyone else is just not true. Yes, we have to do what is required of us (we shouldn't expect to sit around doing nothing while food magically appears on our plate), but we must not loose sight of God's role in everything. I know I will never look at a paycheck (when we finally start to receive one again) the same.