Financial Ruin to Debt Freedom
by Drenda Keesee
I’ll never be out of debt.
I wish I had made changes sooner. Now, I’ll be paying bills for the rest of my life.
Have you spoken words like that or thought that way about your finances?
It’s easy to do when you’re facing what looks like an impossible mountain of debt and no solutions.
I’ve been there.
My husband, Gary, and I made plenty of mistakes with money in the early years of our marriage and raising a family. We worked hard, but we just couldn’t seem to get ahead.
We soon found ourselves…
…in a financial pit, owing on 10 maxed-out credit cards, three finance company loans, two car payments, back taxes to the IRS, judgments, and liens, and $26,000 to relatives.
We lived with our five children in a small, broken-down, 1800s farmhouse, complete with weeds growing through the broken windowpanes. We barely had money for food, let alone home repairs. Our cars were broken-down, too—with bent frames, rusted-out floorboards, and more than 200,000 miles on each of them.
One day, my mother called and asked how we were doing.
“We’re doing great, Mom,” I told her.
“Is that so?” she questioned. “Go to the refrigerator and open the door,” she instructed. “What do you see?”
With quivering lips, I barely managed to sputter out the words as I choked back sobs, “A jar of empty mayonnaise!”
We lived that way for NINE very long years. Year after year, the debt would just keep piling up.
Fixing our situation looked impossible.
Gary and I knew we must have been missing something. We found out that when we get desperate enough to get serious with the Word of God, the answers are there all along. And that was when God revealed several life-changing things to us. To begin, He told us that we had always trusted in debt and the world’s system more than we had trusted in His Word and His Kingdom.
God said, “Take the time to learn how my Kingdom operates, for most of My Church is in the same situation that you are…I want my people free financially.”
There’s so much more to our story, but we went from financial ruin to being completely debt-free over the next two and a half years!
I can’t even describe how that feels. We went from looking like it was too late for us to ever get our finances in order to being able to pay cash for our cars and to build the house we had always dreamed of having. Our lives drastically changed.
It’s not too late for you either.
No matter how bad your situation is, it is fixable.
Here’s the thing though: financial success doesn’t just happen.
You have some steps to take. It will take work. There will be a price involved, and it may take some time. But, I promise you, it will be well worth it.
So how do you get there? How do you move from where you’re at to where you want to go?
1) You have to learn what the Bible says about money, and you have to learn how to apply the financial principles of the Kingdom to your life. You have to truly trust the One who made you, the One that created the earth, the One that has the power to prosper your finances, to build your business, to build your life, to take you from being the tail and make you the head.
2) You have to make important practical decisions to change your financial future.
It’s not too late for you. No matter your financial situation, you can have hope.
God has so much more for you. You can take steps today to build the life you want tomorrow.
~Drenda
ps…Are you looking for a good church? Be sure and listen on Saturday evening or catch the 3 services on Sunday for Faith Life Church!
Drenda Keesee’s contagious zeal and humorous personal experiences help make her ministry of spiritual, emotional, and relational wholeness one that will bless your life and spark a new fire in your spirit.
A wife of over 30 years and a mother of five children, Drenda has ministered at churches, seminars, and conferences, and through the mediums of television and radio, for more than 20 years.
Her books, The New Vintage Family, Better Than You Think, and She Gets It are available wherever books are sold. In these heartfelt books, Drenda shares her personal journey and the life lessons that have brought her to where she is today, as well as practical answers that all people need to live a joyful life.
Drenda and her husband Gary founded Faith Life Now, a ministry designed to spread the message of freedom in the areas of finances, faith, marriage, and family. Tune in for their weekly messages here. Faith Life Now hosts conferences worldwide and sponsors both Fixing the Money Thing, which Drenda co-hosts with her husband Gary and Drenda.
Through their own life experiences, the Keesee’s have found the principles from God’s Word to be powerful and effective. At one point, Drenda was a young, suicidal feminist with no hope of ever being “good enough” for her own standards of perfection. She never wanted the “inconvenience” of a husband or children, and she was on her own path to success. But the stress of trying to achieve perfection and perform for love left her broken and used. She had success, but it was nothing compared to the pain and loneliness it had also brought.
That’s when God got a hold of her heart. It was there—at her lowest point—that she found the One who accepted and loved her, faults and all. Since that transformation, Drenda has had a passion to reach women who find themselves where she once was.
She married Gary after attending college, and there she found herself in a personal boot camp of sorts. She says, “I cried and told God, ‘I can do anything but be a wife and mother.’” She committed to learning how to do it God’s way. Through the many years of raising their children and struggling to make ends meet, Drenda learned from their mistakes. “I didn’t know how to be a wife and mother, but God saved our marriage, taught us how to parent our children for success, showed us how to have financial success, and then the irony of all ironies, He called us to ministry.” It’s truly because of these life experiences that Drenda can now share so many insightful principles for people who are now going through the same struggles.
