002. Money Talks about Faith
Hey you,
This series was interrupted by the death of my mom a few weeks ago. I’m not pushing myself to write too much at this point of time, but something in me wanted to talk about faith and provision a little before resuming the regularly scheduled posts in (hopefully) March but maybe September.
Faith is a tricky topic for me at this moment. Not because I’ve lost it, but because it is getting a little water-logged at present. I joked to a friend recently that I don’t even know what waves are anymore because I think I saw Jonah’s whale swim by not too long ago. After what has proven to be a harrowing half year topped by death, faith has begun to mean different things to me. It’s strange that I feel as if I have less quantity of faith, but it is stronger.
In a way, I’ve started to see faith as the thing which keeps us alive. Someone who loses faith in everything will often kill themselves. Maybe it’s weird to call it the way we access life, but then again, is it? If we have to have faith to live, then it stands to reason that everything we do is based on this ingredient. It takes faith to go out on your own, start a business, learn a new skill, get a new haircut, and, well just about anything we do is because we have faith that it will produce goodness. Those who have faith will endure. They will risk. They will sacrifice.
Faith mystifies me as something that works invisibly. How can faith mean so much? Why is faith so often tied to things like money? If someone has money, we admire them even if we’re dubious about the way they made that money. Money means security. It means comfort. It means status. I guess it makes sense if you consider that money insulates us from being truly in need. No one wants to be the needy one, or a dead weight.
That’s not a bad thing, exactly, but at the same time the way Jesus talks seems to indicate that there’s something about rich people that makes it hard to follow him. He never says don’t be rich, he just says it’s hard to be rich. If money is not an evil, then where’s the stink here? Is it as simple as what we carry?
I turned that idea of carrying on its head and started thinking of faith as where we put our weight. One time a couple of years ago my friends and I were playing around with dance moves, and I tried the one where the girl is up on a post, or fence or something, and jumps into the lead dancer’s arms. I can tell you, that is a terrifying thing to do. Will they catch me? Will their arms break? It is the same thing to a lesser degree that I face to become any kind of a good dancer. A good dance demands that each person put weight on someone else’s center of gravity. Both dancers do this to the other, exchanging weights to make the dance more beautiful — though the man takes more of the weight on himself because women aren’t often as strong.
You have to have faith in the other person to make this work. You have to believe they will catch you before you spin across the room and sustain a concussion. Faith is what makes us start to build the framework that allows us to trust, believe, and even lean on someone else.
The more I think about it the more it makes sense. One of the enemies of believing God for who he is, is because we’re afraid to put any weight on what he says is true, or what he has promised. The risk of disappointment is profound. Hope deferred makes a heart sick, and expectations unfulfilled crush us. I have a great deal of sympathy for Abraham and Sarah laughing at God’s promise to give them a son. The reality was that just wasn’t going to happen. For them to laugh like that probably means Sarah had already gone through menopause. No kid for her, we would think.
To put weight on that promise was going to take a whole lot of faith that there was more to the story than they could see. It was to believe in the impossible. Have you tried to believe in the impossible? Sometimes I think of the story of the couple at Bethel Church asking for their daughter to be raised from the dead. They believed in the impossible, but their daughter didn’t come back to them. I was disappointed with the response from some of the church on a broader scale. They missed several perspectives. One being that God did raise her from the dead. He brought her to himself. Another being that they disobeyed the command to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. I think they probably had more faith than many of us, but sometimes the resurrection is on the other side of the grave.
I just recently read another story about a counsellor who was working with a young man (it was a free service with a church who organized it) and at the end of the session he realized the young man needed to test his faith. He told him that he was free to give whatever he wanted to pay for the session, but to ask the Lord what to give first. The young man said that all he had was exactly the bus fare needed to get home, but the counsellor kept urging him to pray and ask. The young man prayed, and was compelled to give a nickel (I think this was some time ago). Giving this nickel meant walking over ten miles home in snow.
The counsellor knew that here was a crisis of faith, and that he dare not relent. He did not force the issue, but did not move the goal post either. The young man decided to give the nickel. The next week, when he came back the counsellor asked him if he had to walk home. The young man, face shining, said that he stepped outside the church door and a nickel was lying right there on the sidewalk.
The key question to me when thinking of stories like the one above is how do I reconcile the fact that God seems to want me to put my full weight on him, but I’ve still got to pay my bills? How do I say that Jesus is the bread of life while chowing down on a baguette that is incredibly delicious. Are those two things at odd? I think it’s probably one of the bigger conundrums humans face. How is God our all in all when he made all kinds of things to express his nature and goodness? He’s the one who made me need to eat, for pete’s sake, and the calling of work is one that comes to us all. I’m supposed to work, and even Paul talks about people who just refuse to work. He says they shouldn’t eat. On one hand Jesus says blessed are the poor, on the other is this functional understanding of humanity that says we should work and build.
These kinds of baffling questions come at every level. We even face them with relationships. I’ve lost sleep worrying over whether I’m co-dependent or not. Should I have needs that are fulfilled by other humans? It’s almost as dumb a question as should I eat. Instinct and physiology take over and I know I was made to eat and be in relationship. There’s just certain things that aren’t good for us, like eating junk food or engaging in cheap relationship behaviors. But the fact is that if there’s no exchange of weight in a relationship or eating, it’s not a relationship or eating.
What an odd thing faith is, after all. Even the act of eating and making friends takes faith. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t know it gives me life. I have faith that this is truth.
I pursue God for the same reason. I need him for life. Whether or not I think I do or talk like I do is beside the point. I need him. In a simplistic way, that is the reason Jesus came to earth. We had no other way of staying alive. Death would take us and keep us. For me it keeps coming back to this one concept:
First.
What is first? What do I do first? What is first with me? Where am I putting my weight? Most of us split our weight between lots of different relationships and things like a diverse range of food and drink. This is correct and good. We need food, but we don’t eat only one kind of food. We don’t get married and stop having friends or being a church (well, some people do).
Marriage and family is a place that supports more weight than most, but it still isn’t an all-in-all thing. We still search for that one thing. That one answer. That one satisfaction above all others. It’s because we need God. It seems sometimes what God is trying to do is bring us to a place where he himself, is the one thing from which all other things come. Right now we look at that backward, because it seems like all things lead to him, and he’s trying to switch us over to all things come from him.
This has been the pivotal shift of my life recently. When evil is sufficient to our day, the only way to make it through is God’s strength made perfect in our horrified weakness. I believe this is how it happens for everyone. That’s not on my own experience, but on the strength of the Gospel. We as people, stripped down to our brass tacks, are people who were made to need. We were made to support weight, and to put our weight places, but we do none of that if we don’t lay aside our right to a certain life and put our full weight on God. The starving person doesn’t eat wisely, and as humans we forget that unless we are sustained by the giver of life we won’t make any of our choices for how to fill our needs wisely either.
Sometimes we go to the opposite side of pleasure and think our virtue is found in deprivation. Fasting is valuable to understand our relationship to lack, but it is not holiness. Satisfaction is not found in our deprivation, but in God. Things like lack and financial ruin and sorrow and loss are often the things which teach us to rethink where we put our weight, but we can’t put our weight into that space.
When things go awry and we are thrown into space, it shakes our faith enough to question things, as we ought to. It is one of the many benefits to suffering. I would not wish anyone to suffer but here’s the encouraging thing. You will suffer, and you will be better for it, because it produces in us the necessity of settling what we believe, who we trust, and what we are willing to give to our faith at a time when nothing feels worth believing, it hurts to trust, and we are too vulnerable to have what we think is faith.
Faith meets its measure in uncomfortable, insecure, risky, and sometimes flat out painful places. It is birthed in the most simple of ways, but faith, to mature at all, must be tested. We have to put weight on it, otherwise, what is it but a theory of air? It is unfortunate to us, but we have to become weak indeed to know our true faith.
Last September I was involved in a car accident on the heels of another stressful life event (within a week). I wasn’t hurt beyond a few scrapes and bruises, but the man on the motorcycle was critically injured. I will never forget kneeling behind him on the hot pavement, begging God to let him live. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that there was a chain of command that day. It was God who was a giver and taker of life, and it was doctors and paramedics which carried out some of his work. The following month in which I did not have my phone, my car, or zero idea what the legal repercussions would be, were both a hard and rich time. The Bible came alive, and I burrowed down in those pages and hid in the shelter of the most high. I knew that I was as small and helpless as I had ever been, and that whatever happened it would be because God was in it. I knew that I had almost no faith because every day it took every bit I had. I put those two pennies of faith in the coffer as faithfully as I could. I gave everything I had in the way of hope. During those first few days where I waited to hear if the man would live or die Jesus gave me a promise. He did not say the man would live, that was hidden from me, but he said that he would calm three waves: justice, legal, and the largest of all, fear.
Probably the hardest thing I have ever done was get out of the boat to put weight on a promise I didn’t think I should have. The accident was not intentional, but it is difficult to come face to face with the way our actions hurt others. The responsibility of that weighed heavily on me, but try as I might I could not find evidence in the Bible that I was supposed to carry that weight of condemnation. I carried this man in prayer and intercession, but I didn’t carry my sin. Jesus says “for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and he is serious about that. We simply aren’t meant to carry dead weights.
This is the most radical idea anyone can ever put their faith into, and it is the only way to please God. To allow for the payment of my life and actions was… insane to me, but it was the only way to fully put my weight on God. The reality of forgiveness changed me, and it allowed me to change the way I interacted with the ways people have hurt me. I have carried those weights, but not because Jesus asked me too. This is forgiveness. When others give us their weight to carry we can carry that weight to Jesus. For I give. The Gospel comes through yet again as a giving thing.
Like I said, radical, but the best explanation of faith and forgiveness I have found yet. This is why Jesus never stopped talking about giving up everything. He knew we would think about possibility according to ourselves and the world, and not according to him.
About 48 hours after the accident I received the word that they expected the man to live and make a recovery. Relief washed me from head to toe. This may have been my third baptism. I knew to write about this publicly was to walk the fine line of confusing faith with provision, because God’s provision doesn’t always make sense even if we have put our weight of faith on him. It’s scary business because sometimes the story doesn’t make sense. God’s provision to heal my mom through her death doesn’t make sense as my provision. My provision looks a lot like still having a mom, but my faith says that something bigger is happening here than my sorrow. It’s not just my story. Mom wanted to be healed. She had just said, “I’m done. I want to be healed” and a day later she was. I see this side of death, but she sees the resurrection of it. Her answered prayer is my grief.
It’s not just mom’s story either. Faith in essence is the belief that somehow things will work out when everything around us says it won’t. When you confess your faith out loud, it is putting yourself into a real possibility of failure in the eyes of man, because promises are too big for us, just like suffering is too big for us. I’ll be honest. I’ve dealt with fear that in posting this blog post, yet another hard thing will happen to me and again I’ll get slammed down on the rock. Fear is such an ugly thing. My brother says things can always get worse and always get better. It’s difficult to trust in the middle of a time like this that it will ever get better. In fact, I can’t put my hope there. I don’t know that it will. My life could be a series of unfortunate events until I die, but I don’t put my faith in my life. I must put it in God.
The creation in seasons, stories in scripture, and stories of the people around me seem to indicate that no one’s life stays terrible for long periods of time. We could not endure otherwise. God is aware of our limitations, though I have wondered if he got mine wrong somehow. Even then, though he slay me, I praise him. God has not reneged on a single promise, even as he has not spared me wrenching pain. He has not left me, even though there is often too much hurt to do more than weep or gnash my teeth before him.
After the accident my finances were shaking. I didn’t know how I would get through. The attorney had told me that much would depend on how insurance played out. One day I was sitting in my office and someone dropped off an envelope of thousands of dollars at my desk. Another day, a random check in the mail would come, covering something like towing expenses and rentals. The day before Thanksgiving I received a call from a number I didn’t recognize, so I ignored it. It was an insurance agent to let me know my policy did not cover the medical expenses for this man who had been injured. I panicked. What did this mean? There weren’t things like poorhouses anymore, were there? What if I got sued? There’s no way I have money to cover a hospital bill. I looked over to the corner of my living room, because I was cleaning that day in preparation for Thanksgiving guests, and saw something which made me stop in my rush of fear.
Four hours earlier I had stopped in a local secondhand store, and there sat My Chair. It was a chair I’d wanted for years. It’s called a chair-and-a-half and it’s big enough to curl up in for a nap, or for two people in a pinch. Like a love seat, but cozier for small spaces like my cottage. I had never justified the purchase because the one I wanted was $1400 and, sheesh. When I walked to the furniture section of the store earlier that day I gasped and bought that chair before stopping to think. $50. I jokingly told my friend it was my Chair of Provision. Jehovah Jireh.
Four hours later I looked at that chair in the corner of the living room and I was certain. Jehovah Jireh was going to come through. Jesus would calm the waves. A few weeks later the agent told me that the injured man’s policy should cover the rest. I still have not received any fines or been summoned to court hearings and legal mess. I can’t see the road ahead or know what could crop up, but I am learning that even in raw circumstances, God is not stingy with his care. The giver of life is giving me life. He is sustaining me. The process of this past year has been teaching me a much bigger God than I ever dreamed I would get to know, and it is only by getting out of the boat and putting my weight on the Water of Life that I can say this with any confidence.
I am surprised by how practical God has been in his care to me. He hasn’t missed a detail. I had started giving away larger sums of money before my mom died, and in the week after her death I received back every penny, almost to the exact amount, through generosity of friends. It was awe inspiring. Even more mind blowing is that God gives me personal promises and then fulfills them. For me! What in the world! This is the stuff of Abraham, and the ancient fathers of old. It is a giddy and humbling and terrible feeling to stand with the ancient fathers by faith. It is something which I have chosen willingly to give my all to, and I have never been so frightened, in pain, and cared for in my life. Suddenly I find myself with an entirely different money flow. This provision is not abstract, it shows up in my bank accounts this very second.
At the beginning of 2021 I asked God for generosity, and boy hey did he ever answer. Not only did he give me opportunities to give up everything I had, but he made me the recipient of lavish provision. Given the choice I would never, ever have walked this red-hot road, but it has changed me. I am no longer on my own. I see that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and blessed is his name. Granted, I usually have to cry up a storm when I say things like that, but crying releases oxytocin, so I’m the real winner here, yeah?
I will talk more about self-sufficiency when I write this next post about generosity, but meantime I want to say one more thing.
If you have a hard time practicing your faith in real life, you are not alone. If you have a life that doesn’t require much faith it could be because you do not need anyone or anything.
That feels like a hard thing to say, but then again Jesus did tell the rich young man to sell everything he had or give it away. It is hard to enter the kingdom of heaven as a rich person, and what we have to understand is while this seems to be about money, it is more about our self sufficiency and lack of faith. I don’t know what the Lord will ask you to do, but I can tell you it starts with asking him. It worked that way for the rich young ruler, it worked that way for me, and well, it works that way for everyone. Ask the Lord to teach you, and he will never fail you.
I tremble to write this, because I know firsthand how painful the stripping has been in my life, but also, how… beautiful. After the funeral week my sister said this has been one of the most odd, most beautiful weeks she has ever experienced. I knew what she meant. It was a week of heavier grief than I could have imagined, and it has come on the heels of months of storms. How will I make it through?
And yet, the ocean has convinced me that God is infinitely bigger than I can imagine, and yet cares for the hair on my head and the falling of a sparrow. He is not against me, but for me. I have found comfort in knowing that his care of me is not a testament to me, but him. Letting go of the need to deserve love and forgiveness and money is freeing, and through this I am persuaded that faith is an integral ingredient to learning about how we handle money. Watching the flow of my finances, emotions and spiritual progress over the last six months shows me that in God, it is impossible to divorce faith from our bank accounts, and that as we grow in maturity that all these things “get married.” Our finances are no longer separate from our faith.
It is by faith that we live.
QUOTES FROM ANCIENT CHURCH FATHERS
My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ. Paul in Colossians
What good is it, my brothers, if someone claims to have faith, but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you tells him, “Go in peace; stay warm and well fed,” but does not provide for his physical needs, what good is that? So too, faith by itself, if it does not result in action, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.
-James
Lovingly,
L.Raine
P.s. Until I finished this I didn’t realize how fitting it is to release this one (and the next on giving) at this time of mourning mom. She carried me in extra weight for nine months, and spent a long time after that still carrying me and introducing me to life.
Call your mom, friends. Write her a letter. Thank her. She’s the reason you’re here. LR
Photo of lighthouse by Marcus Woodbridge. Photo of tornado by Nikolas Noonan.
