By Krista Ralston Oakes

The Lord is eager to help us when we sincerely try to be obedient to the counsel of our priesthood leaders.

Many years ago my husband and I received special counsel during our tithing settlement. After commending us for declaring our status as full tithe-payers, our bishop explained that he was counseling all ward members to reduce their debt, increase their savings, and build up their food storage during the coming year.

At the time, this counsel seemed both difficult and irrelevant to us. We had been married for many years with no children, and we were desperately trying to conceive a child using very expensive infertility treatments. We felt justified plunging deep into debt in order to pursue our righteous desire for children.

Additionally, we didn’t think that financial preparedness was that critical for us, because my husband owned a very large amount of founder’s stock in the dot-com company he was working for, and the company was preparing to go public. We thought we were sitting on a sure future of financial security, and this made us unconcerned about our growing debt and our meager savings and food storage.

However, as we returned home and pondered our bishop’s counsel, and as we were really honest with ourselves, we came to realize deep in our hearts that this counsel was inspired. And it was consistent with counsel that the prophet had given just two months earlier in general conference. We wanted to be obedient to this counsel, because we sincerely sustained these priesthood leaders. But we also wanted children, and we were in a situation where children would not come into our family without great expense, as expensive medical treatments and adoption were our only available options.

It seemed as though we were caught between two conflicting righteous desires. Should we follow the prophet and our bishop, or should we have children? Was there a way for us to accomplish both? We decided to make it a matter of prayer and fasting to ask the Lord for help.

The Lord was swift and generous in answering our prayers. Within a matter of weeks I received a phone call at my office from a consultant friend, whose client was looking for someone to fill an executive position in my field of experience. I easily landed the new job, which resulted in a significant increase in compensation, including a bigger salary and a generous signing bonus. My husband and I were amazed at how rapidly and unexpectedly this new job situation fell into our laps, and we knew that it was a direct answer to our prayers.

Our first response was to quickly and significantly reduce our debt, including paying our car loan in full. Next, we established sufficient emergency savings to ensure that basic expenses could be covered for several months. Then we added to our food storage, starting with a few months’ worth of basics and adding to it each week. Miraculously, there was still enough money available for us to afford the medical procedures that ultimately followed, without increasing our debt.

Less than a year after we received our bishop’s counsel, my husband’s employer went the way of many companies when the dot-com “bubble” burst. Instead of going public, the company started to go belly-up. I remember the day when my husband called from the office to tell me that the company’s paychecks had bounced.

Many of his co-workers were in a panic, scrambling to figure out how to meet their basic needs. Some didn’t have enough food for the rest of the week, and they had no money to go to the grocery store. Others were worried about losing their homes when their mortgage or rent checks bounced. By contrast, my husband and I had minimal debt and lots of savings and food storage, and we were able to easily ride out the situation until my husband could find a new job.

That counsel from our bishop ended up being very relevant after all, and we marveled at how inspired it was. Had we dismissed it as irrelevant, or had we put our own desires ahead of this counsel, we would have found ourselves in a very stressful and difficult situation. This experience really punctuated one of my favorite scriptures, which says: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding…” (Proverbs 3:5)

Krista Ralston Oakes is the author of Fertile in our Faith: Infertility, Pregnancy Loss, Adoption, and Filling the Measure of our Creation (Millennial Press). She lives in Plano, Texas, with her husband, Jared, and children, Jacob and Emma.