Hammer on Anvil '

This week Hammer on Anvil welcomes guest blogger Amanda Pyatt Bush.  Amanda and her family have been going through some difficult times lately.  There have been struggles, but she has remained faithful throughout.  Here, she shares her story to date:

God has been working in my heart for a long time. Purging the pride, trying to make me into a diamond, as I am still very much a piece of coal; and it is not fun (most of the time). When I am living life and all of a sudden God looks down into my little world and says “Amanda, NO, this is not what I have in mind for you” it can be scary, exciting, and I say ok, what now. “God lifts up the humble and opposes the proud.” That is my lesson in life. Pride is the sin of all sin; it is the mother and the cause of the fall of Satan and then man.

Charlie(my husband) and I have talked about living in a RV, maybe traveling the country, going where the work is and maybe living a little cheaper, for about 3 years now. It was just an idea for a long time but after my sweet cousin died we decided that we are tied down to a house, we are living outside of what we make, we are not happy and the stress of no money and lots of bills was just not the way we wanted to live anymore. We prayed about it a lot and decided, we are changing our life, we are going to take steps to make our outcome meet our income and then become mobile so that we can be wherever God wants us to be.

The first thing we did was change our lifestyle, this was before we even decided to rent the house and live in an RV. We decided to home school our children, so they could get God’s word in their little hearts, read better and have more family time. We sold my van and I started to ride a bike, we started to take processed food, sugars, carbs, and other toxic foods from our diet. We cut back on our meat intake and charged up the veggie and fruits. I personally lost 30 lbs in a few short months (and I am still losing weight today). My blood pressure regulated and I started to feel the pain in my body go away. We began looking at things in life, like how much TV we watched versus outside time and time just playing. We began to notice when we focus on God all day with praise music and reading His word we were more like the things we kept striving to be. Patience, kindness, slow to anger, loving the unlovable, and forgiveness comes so much quicker. We were starting to really see God’s blessing in a personal way.

When we decided to rent our home and buy an RV we sold every piece of furniture we owned; there were a few days we had nothing to sit on. It was the first real feeling of "We are really doing this!". We looked for a long time for something we could pay payments on that would be nice with 2 bedrooms and lots of room. God didn’t want that for us and we were not able to get a loan, after all we didn’t have a whole lot of income in the first place. We then decided that we needed to go with something we can buy with cash, honestly that was hard, God taught me a lot in those days. HE taught me to walk in his light, as a path I can only see a few steps at a time. We were disappointed a lot, had some hard cries even as a couple, a few fights from stress and God always centered us back up and reminded us to take one step at a time and not worry or fret over tomorrow. We finally got to the point that we just would walk it out everyday and just trust. Honestly, after the trust on our side started to kick in, God’s wisdom came too, we began to see things a little differently. We realized he was going to take care of everything and then the real blessing came in droves. We had lots of hiccups, lots of moments of breakdown but they never lasted more than 24-48 hours, and honestly were often hormone-induced rather than not trusting.

The blessings, oh the blessing!!!! They came almost once a week, crazy stuff one right after another, bam, bam, bam. I often felt bad because my Aunt was still struggling hardcore over the loss of her son, but I prayed everyday asking for peace and joy in her heart, I still do. I knew God had a plan there too and I had to trust that He would take care of her and her family. While I am getting good news on a daily basis, I trust God would bring her peace. It was very difficult, but I had to trust HE knew what He was doing and I was just supposed to keep posting and praising my God for His good works in my life.

Some of the blessings were crazy, some small and some so big God put me in shock. We found our renters two days after we decided to rent, good people with children who want to buy the house when the market turns around. We found an RV perfect for us, for $4500.00. We had made $3600.00 on our garage sale and the guy who sold it to us who was also a Christian, pretty hard core, told us he would sell it to *us* for $3500.00, so we had $100.00 to put gas in it to get it home. Then we thought we were going to pay $300.00 for a renter to stay at our home, (which was better than us paying the full $1500.00 every month), but God has a better plan in that too; after me trying to modify our loan for almost a year I talked to HOPE a government program and three weeks later the papers came in the mail and the payment was lowered with just signatures by $400.00. We no longer had to worry about paying extra to rent our home. Soon after that, God worked in that same situation again. The payment was dropped another $400.00; we now make a profit from renting our home. I was blown away, and I personally did nothing to make that happen. I had truly given up at that point. We just signed papers, no more documents needed, no more finding, coping, filing, or them losing every piece of paper I sent to them. God just fixed it! I used to work in the loan business and I know from personal experience that mortgage companies are not just nice. WOW! Yes, God made Himself very real to me in those moments. It felt like God was saying “Hey I am real and I am going to take care of you, my child who chooses to follow Me, even when everyone else tells you, you are crazy.” It was about His glory, it was about Him becoming real to anyone who knows us well. It wasn’t about me or our family so much as it was about us following and God being God and showing others who He is through our story.

The blessing didn’t stop there, people gave us money out of nowhere, we were blessed by people feeding us when money was tight (they didn’t know it). We were criticized by our decision and we were lifted up and blessed by people’s words, at the same time. No matter how much the enemy tried to dismantle and discourage us, confuse us, God stepped in and made His holy self very clear!

God is now showing me that this whole move is just beginning; we are just now starting to see there is a much bigger plan in all this. We have only seen the surface of this mighty GOD we serve. It is bringing out more of us, purging more pride, more sin, more selfishness, pushing us mentally, physically, and spiritually more than we have ever been pushed before. We have had to control our tempers, when we are so tired we can hardly see straight, we have had to have patience when we are ready to just lie down and quit, God is calling out the “Champion in our family” as a great friend of mine would say. I believe Satan is trying to push us, bring stuff up against us and he is getting more sneaky about it, hitting me when I am most vulnerable, when I am sad, emotional, hormonal. He knows my weaknesses and he is getting good and finding them and attacking at the right times. God, is teaching me when I am most vulnerable and He is holding me in His righteous right hand, in the quite still voice, telling me, “Hey… calm down, you are being attacked and you need to spend some time with Me right now, stop what you are doing and worship Me, sit with Me, and let Me help you sort this out.”

I am excited to see what else God has in store for this family. We are ready and willing, our deepest desire is to follow, and we are addicted to the ways of God, we want what HE wants, even when we can’t figure out what that looks like in reality.

We are ready, God send us.

Amanda Pyatt Bush

Yesterday marked a special anniversary for my husband and me -- not of our wedding, but of a time in our lives when we saw the Lord do wondrous things.

My husband is a journalist, and 22 years ago he was fired from his job on a small-town newspaper. Though both the editor and publisher said John's work record was impeccable, he was fired. Why? Because we started a right-to-life group.

A handful of townspeople met on a Saturday afternoon to start our group, and our public relations representative took a press release to the local newspaper Monday morning. We wanted people to know our group was starting so they would be informed, and could join us if they desired. That afternoon, John was called into the publisher's office and was told he had two options: quit his job, or quit the group. He declined to do either, and was fired on the spot.

At the time, I was working as a church secretary three mornings a week, and brought in a little less than $40 per week. We had three small sons, ages 3, 6 and 7. When the ax fell, though, we experienced a surreal peace about the whole thing. John had taken a stand for righteousness, and we knew God would take care of us.

When the firing happened, the Des Moines Register picked up the story. From there, the Associated Press got it, and it went nationwide overnight. The article appeared in USA Today, the AFA (American Family Association) Journal, and Moody Monthly magazine, as well as countless other newspapers.

What happened next gives me goosebumps to this day: we started receiving money in the mail from all over the country. People whom we had never met wrote to us, saying they were praying for our family. For a brief time, we went on a speaking circuit, as churches contacted us and asked us to come share our testimony.

An attorney in our church contacted The Rutherford Institute, a religious liberties organization that we had never heard of. We were encouraged to sue the newspaper. Though John and I were not out for money, our attorneys said it would set a dangerous precedent if we did nothing. It would mean you can get fired in this country if you act on your religious convictions. We agreed to pursue legal action.

In the meantime, an urban newspaper editor in California had read our story, and said he wanted John to come work for him. God subsequently made it clear that Sacramento was where we were to go.

Two years after the firing, we were preparing to fly back to Iowa for the court case, when we received a phone call, saying the newspaper had decided to settle out of court. The newspaper agreed to sign a written statement saying they had violated John's religious convictions. Our attorney said that, had we gone to court, no judge would have made the newspaper sign such a document.

We were only in California two-and-a-half years, when John got a job as news editor for Christianity Today magazine. When he applied, he did it a bit halfheartedly; he said he didn't think he'd get a job like that in a million years. It was his dream job; the kind you think you'll never get.

He did get his dream job. It turns out that the job he had in California provided him with the religion writing and editing experience he needed to be hired at Christianity Today -- and it was experience he never would've gotten at that small-town newspaper.

I reminded him then of Psalm 37:4: "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart." He had honored God by being willing to lose his very livelihood, and now God was blessing him.

Be assured that when you delight yourself in the Lord -- when you seek first His righteousness -- He will give you all that you need.