Spencer & Chris’s Unfinished Story
Spencer and Chris Manuel may be familiar faces to those who attend the Café campus.Spencer is involved with the worship team and Chris volunteers as a Connection Leader.
In reflecting on the path they have walked, Chris says, “Our giving journey is interesting because I didn’t really have much of a giving story when we first got married. I was raised in a Baptist home and I understood what tithing was, but when we were first married, we didn’t have a lot of income. I’m very much an administrative budgeter and I was very afraid to set money aside to tithe because we may or may not have enough money to pay our bills. It created a lot of fear in me.”
Spencer remembered, “One evening we had really been struggling over our finances and what we were going to do. Chris was especially stressed that evening and she went to bed. I wasn’t able to go to bed right away. I just thought, ‘You know, God, You have always been faithful, why wouldn’t You be faithful now?’ I was reminded of some of the things that He had done for us, and the blessings we’d had in our life and I decided to write them down. I grabbed some Post-It notes and started writing them down and putting them on the mirror in our bathroom. It was a large mirror with a long counter and two sinks. They just kept coming and coming and I realized there were more Post-It notes than I could put on the mirror. So, I started putting them around the mirror. When I finished, the entire mirror was covered, the entire perimeter of the mirror was covered, and I went to bed.”
The next morning, Chris woke up and saw what Spencer had done. “I walked into the bathroom like I would any morning and looked up and started reading one note at a time across the mirror and I knew exactly what it was.”
“In the Old Testament when God showed up, they would build an altar. It may just be some stones or some things that were placed in that area that were a sign that God had shown up and had done something there. The notes on the mirror were an altar of sorts. They stayed on the mirror until we moved,” Spencer said.
“Our faith is what it is today because we’ve experienced God moving in our life. We’ve experienced His provision. To see God’s provision work today in the current situation we are in, is going to be exciting,” Chris reflected, “I think one of the things that has spoken to me about theUnfinishedinitiative is that God is not done with me yet. It’s not about money. It’s about putting myself in a position to keep stretching, to keep growing, and to keep living out what my Christian faith means to me. We are not finished yet and God has more for us. No matter what age we are or socio-economic status we are at, God wants to do things in and through us and we need to give Him that opportunity.”
By Darryl Devaney