Shoutlouder

holy speed shopping

// August 14th, 2008 // Faith, Inspiration

Even before the entire global economy went into meltdown I’ve not been one for spending money on stuff without thinking whether I’m getting a good deal for my money. It seems that even buying a bag of crisps will set you back a months salary these days and so the idea of ‘shopping around’ is ever more on the agenda if you want to get a good deal. You can even shop around for your electricity these days!

However, after a number of attempts to Google the entire planet in search of the cheapest possible means through which I can buy a litre of milk and a tin of beans I’ve decided that I simply don’t have time to shop around.. so I’m just going to have to ‘faith’ it…

I haven’t come to this conclusion wildly either as I’ve recently had two occasions where I’ve bought something on the spur of the moment and the nudge of the Spirit and walked away with an amazing bargain. And I did it without a shopbot in a mile of my fingertips. I like to think of it as Holy Speed Shopping!

The first occasion was back in October when I’d had a pretty cool day and things were going well when I felt the Holy Spirit nudge me and say – “why don’t you check out the Skoda Garage today?”… Now you might be thinking that here’s God having a bit of a laugh with me.. but the truth was I’d been thinking about buying a Skoda Octavia for a few months because they’re big, reliable and relatively cheap. So after finding myself down at the dealership and scouting out the Octavia’s on show, I come across a gorgeous silver Honda Accord, about 2 years old with only 8000 miles on the clock and its Automatic as well! (For anyone reading this from a developed country – the UK for some reason still sells mostly Manually operated cars as opposed to the labour saving automatic gearbox). It’s ticking all the boxes including the fact its NOT a skoda and by the end of the afternoon I’ve got a part-exchange for £1000 off my old heap plus another £750 of the price through haggling and a deposit paid! Now – how often do you go and buy a car in one day, having looked at only one dealership!

The second recent occasion of Holy Speed Shopping was after thinking about buying my family an LCD TV to replace the heap we had at home. There again came the Spirit nudge and before I knew it I’m in the shop picking up a TV with over £200 off the price…

You may call me jammy – you may call me other names I can’t write down – but whatever it is I’m pretty grateful for the fact that moneysupermarket.com has nothing on doing life with the Holy Spirit. And before you start assaulting me for trivialising my relationship with God down to the level of consumerism – isn’t the idea that we do ALL our life with Him? So if it’s important to involve God in the big decisions of our lives then why not in the decisions that cost us our hard earned cash. After all – every bargain God brings my way leaves more cash in the bank to invest and sow! And more importantly He knows how much I really do HATE shopping around…