High unemployment. Housing 
foreclosures. Economic uncertainty. People have always worried about finances, but this country’s recession has heightened those concerns for many. By last spring, Jon Thompson’s worry about providing for his family of six had become a heavy burden, one he needed desperately to unload.
Jon had used his work experience and advanced degree in chemistry to launch several high-tech businesses in 2009. While this 35-year-old Christian husband and father realized that money would be tight as he began to build his new ventures, worry about finances began to overwhelm him.
“I can’t tell you how much of a burden it was to worry about the bills in the mail box and about the heating bill, in addition to the stress of all the uncertainty of starting a business,” Jon says. “Grocery shopping was a sickening experience for me. I would get physically sick every time I got the mail. I would get angry at my spouse for purchasing what I perceived to be frivolous items, but they weren’t frivolous. It was an awful heavy burden.”
Jon took his burden to God and began reading the Psalms and meditating on them. “Jesus told us that the Holy Spirit would teach us all things and tell us what He sees,” Jon says. So Jon listened as he read God’s word: “O my soul, why are you cast down within me? Hope thou in God. For I shall yet praise him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”
Jon realized that David, who wrote many of the Psalms, had also carried a heavy burden, but that burden was lifted when David remembered the times God had intervened in his life.
“I started to remember all that God had provided in the last year alone, and as I started to list all of the Father’s provision, joy and faith entered. But the heaviness still dominated.”
Then one night in “utter desperation” to unload his burden of worry, Jon fell to his knees just before midnight in his office. That’s when God showed him that the “weighty feeling” came because Jon was trusting in himself to provide, not God; that if he truly believed God and trusted him, he would not let financial worries control his mind.
“In that cry, he met me,” Jon says. “He took away my unbelief and replaced it with his faith. This was a breakthrough! He took me by the right hand and set my feet upon a rock – instantaneously. I got up off the floor. The burden was gone, and I started to laugh with joy. I leaped for joy! He delivered me from the bondage of unbelief. He will keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Him. He has put a new song in my heart!
“Since that time, I have had no inkling of worry about money, because I am on the King’s dime. I can’t imagine taking my finances back from Jesus. This breakthrough has nothing to do with money or finances, and everything to do with trusting that God will do what he says he will do.”
“I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.” Isaiah 42:16