What are you spending on your spending?

As I think about this topic, I feel that I have a whole book to say and could someday have the credibility for other people to learn from it.  But for a blog post I am only going to share the exact concept of the title, which is the idea that some success in saving money actually requires extravagant spending of strength and attention.  And the second thing to add is what could bother some people, which is that it might not be worth it.

 

I have said in other posts that I strongly believe a key thing to learn in life is that there are multiple overlapping economies of hundreds of blessings or efforts, and not all value is reflected in any financial economy, which is also likely to have layers and unaccounted resources.  

 

But what I am saying now is that when people try to be good with their money, there are a lot of options.  In a way I could say, what is needed is a whole life offering to God, so really you have to spend everything you have.  And I do believe that, but in terms of day-to-day budgeting, I actually have the opposite thing to say, which is that people might do well to not obsess about it and instead try to have just a few good habits. 

 

For me, in my successful years of financial faithfulness, it was a matter of not spending more than I had, and making sure I was generous.  I also tried to give ten percent to anything Christian, which usually wasn’t my church.  This is where my post becomes more like book material, and I will say I really think that during a certain 12 years, I was probably in a 99^th percentile of financial faithfulness.  I heartily prescribe that to other people, though everyone has different lives and a lot of people really suffer and have kids to take care of, etc.

 

People could get mad even at my little headline, but I know it is a good concept to think of.  There are two other phases of my life that are different, where I lived rather haphazardly on loan money from my parents, based on my probable and to me, due success as an author, and now, after some unexplained farce of rejection, a time of suffering when I am totally dependent on other people because of disability.  The people I am dependent on, which is taxpayers and my mom, are actually people who I think have “spent a lot on their spending.”  In other words, severe frugality and life cost to make sure money is not wasted.  And because of the limited resources that actually might not be a coincidence from that, I am both abpruptly and gradually reverting back to my old habits of general faithfulness on a small “salary.”

 

That is more personal info than I usually include in these worldly monk posts, but I think it is a good topic to think about, because there are many approaches to managing money, and to me, even some of the most popular books about it are misoriented.  What I am suggesting is not a joke, and the fact that my success and reward is currently obscured by abuse, loss and horrifically, financial dependence, will never reverse or undo the truth of how blessed my life was for many years as I survived as a humble and generous person with the budget that was granted to me by God, already minimized by greedy people who will never be satisfied by their unfair gain.

 

What are you spending on your spending?  Are you a coupon person? It could be a good idea. But leaving big tips and forgetting about money altogether also has its reward. That is all I will say. People can get mad and probably will. That is another economy of emotions that can also function with choices of investment in feeling better or living life with other goals.  

 

My book about this will probably only be available or accepted when I am dead, partially because this life-giving truth is the exact reason why people would want to kill me.

“Why do evangelicals talk to us like we’re stupid?”

I felt it almost every Sunday at the church I went to.  Songs that translated ideas from the bible in such a way that there almost wasn’t any meaning left.  People assuming you were an idiot because you were depressed.  Leaders who almost had to literally move your arms and legs for you as part of their act to use you in their conversion scenes. It was from some kind of ignorance, some kind of neglect to love as Christ loved, and some kind of motivation that caused people to be directors for a babyish play while we suffered in an agonizing moral crisis everywhere else we went.   

But I am going to have to defend people a little bit and say that there is a legitimate mistake in the mix, which is that it actually is pretty stupid not to follow Jesus Christ, and especially not to care.  God gave humanity and most individuals a lot of information about what really matters, and more than information, the actual blessings of common grace. And as evangelicals have watched people all around us choose a worthless life of abuse and waste, forfeiting the eternal rewards of basic church service, they can’t help but condescend with their own matching ignorance.
 
It's kind of comical to be a Christian for thirty years and have people assume you don’t know how to pray, all because you are sitting in the “audience” at church instead of standing up front, which is the one thing they would never let you do.  But at the same time, you have to kind of see it how they see it sometimes, like “why aren’t you one of us?” Gosh, I still have to say, you said it, not me, but I also have to say that the comedy is in their favor.  That their inferior culture expressions become almost like a God-inspired mockery of the true retardation in question, which is people’s stubborn, foolish persecution that we will never understand and never will have to.

A Bad Climate Indeed

When I was in seventh grade, I read a book about the creation and evolution debate, called “Inherit the Wind.” It is actually a play, and I think I went and saw it performed with a friend of mine from church. We had a nice discussion about how evolution and genesis were probably both true.  I was twelve years old.  

Later, in high school, I made a poster for my biology class about evolution, where I made the word “evolution,” evolve across the cardboard, and I tore a page of Genesis from an old bible and glued it next to some kind of science diagram that represented natural selection.  
 
I mention those two examples to say that I have a history of being a nice reasonable person who should not be portrayed as some kind of “William Jennings Bryant” religious freak who doesn’t believe in chemical reactions and photosynthesis.
 
But I am.  Everyone from my faith background is treated like garbage in the news and everywhere else, and the new context used against us is climate change.  It is the same political problem as usual, but I have to say that the pattern is as recognizable as the usual snake patterns found in the other worst parts of nature.  It is a complete media assault, also prevelant in schools that people pay to attend, and it will forever be seen for what it is.
 
Do you want to know my theory? I think some animals across time prayed to God in their distress, similar to us now, asked for help to survive, and received merciful mutations that gloriously lasted for hundreds of millions of years: generations of animal descendants who will be found faithful in God’s sight.  
 
Meanwhile, some species didn’t do so well, and have found their dodo birds of a feather with aggressive greedy liberals who only know how to prey on mistreated religious people or other swindled students who chose to obey God anyway with supernatural patience during another thirty-year attempt to warp religious life into a feeding trough of humiliation for devolved demons, many of which were probably the evolution champions of the 50s.
 
If you want to make climate change the new religion, you can, but I think the embarrassment will be yours if you can’t bring yourself to also acknowledge the realities of heaven and hell, or even earth, for that matter.