Money: A Contemplative Challenge in the Building Years
Document Actions
by Diane Paras
My recently married friends and I sometimes joke (commiserate?) about something we have recently lost: our disposable incomes! We talk less of weekend trips, concerts and other entertainments and more about paint, tables and chairs, and trips to the hardware store. We laugh at the change that seems to have happened overnight. We are in the "building years."The building years are that time in life when we are building our lives materially. Three weeks ago my husband and I bought our first house. This is a typical first major financial goal among our peers. What is next? Mutual funds and retirement accounts sufficient for what might be a post-social security era? A family?
This is particularly challenging for those of us who desire our lives to be God-led. Some questions have arisen for me: How should I handle money during this time of building, of planning a future? This money question is also a lifestyle question. One can ask, "what kind of lifestyle do I want?" Or one can ask, "How much money do I want to have and how will I spend it?"
There is so much involved in shaping a lifestyle and planning a future. It is fun in lots of ways. We dream, set goals, work to achieve these goals. It is especially fun to see plans materialize as they have for me right now with my new house. As I celebrate, however, I notice a nagging feeling emerging: Am I acting as though my future depends on my own control of resources?
God alleviates my sense of control over the future somewhat with jokes at my expense. For example, the house that I have bought is in the one place that I swore I would never live: my own hometown where I grew up and went to school! When the house came on the market, I didn't even want to look at it. But I felt unmistakably led! OK, so God is really the one in control. Still, I had to meet God partway.
One of the places to meet God seems to be in my prayer about choices. As far as my new financial choices are concerned, it seems as though they have deeper implications than those I made in the past. These choices reflect my values and willingness to truly be God-led through the landmines of desiring security and society's consumerism. Yes, landmines is the right word; I've heard so many stories from people who looked back at the material goals they achieved and found them empty.
I wish God would just hand me a blueprint--a lifestyle formula for my husband and me; it would be so much less confusing. But of course there are no formulas. We will have many lifestyle decisions to make in the next years which may need frequent reevaluating. We will look at how much is enough and how much feels right. We will discuss to what extent we might live below our means or spend (spread around) what we earn.
The only way I can figure to navigate through these landmines is by prayerfully trusting our security to God and being open to God.
Being open to God means being open to the truths that God presents to us. Some truths hurt a lot; the truth of unequal access to goods and opportunity in our country and on our planet is particularly hard. I know, for example, that I am part of a small minority of people who have any choice at all over lifestyle. Yet being open to God means acknowledging the mystery of having so much when others have so little. It means listening to God's daily nudges, whether they invite giving or enjoying, or both.
This opens up the question of giving. As a professional fundraiser, I am aware of the statistics that show people in the building years are not, as a group, large givers. With responsibilities for the futures of children, selves and sometimes parents, there sometimes doesn't seem to be enough for charities. How does one give when one is saving? How does one give when one feels the weight of future responsibilities that one cannot accurately predict? I grapple with this myself, and I know it is scary. Yet, to be God-led, isn't the idea to be willing to let go of everything, even of our sense of responsibilities, and be open instead to the responsiveness God invites of us?
We cannot anticipate what God may want for us, cannot confine God to what our limited minds might imagine. For myself, I know that to open the planning of my financial future to God requires two things of me: the courage to listen to God and the courage to accept God's guidance. I pray for both.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.