It wasn’t too many years ago that news of a recession and the falling of stock prices would have been meaningless to me, mostly because I didn’t have any stock in anything and didn’t own a home. Being healthy and able to work myself to death gave me a sense of self-righteousness about monetary wealth. I would preach, much to my embarrassment now, about trusting God for our financial needs and not depending on savings accounts and retirement investments. Easy for me to say to all those wonderful people who took time each week to hear me preach and to pay my paycheck. Ah the simplicity of being young and naive! I wonder why someone didn’t just slap me or try to not pay me and see how well I practiced what I preached.
There is a subtle difference between living with faith that God will provide and being just plain irresponsible.
God has been faithful in providing for me anyway. This would lead me to believe that God is less interested in my being perfect than am I. Sure I’ve learned some painful lessons about debt and credit and needing versus wanting. But in the end, God has provided what I needed when I needed it regardless of me getting it all right.
Here we are in the midst of a panicking financial world. Those with wealth in investments are feeling the pain. But those who have nothing, still have nothing. I may have been naive about financial matters, but I have to say that there is a freedom in having nothing to lose (I think that was Janis Joplin’s line in Bobby Magee….). Financial crisis does bring clarity about what is needful and what is merely materialistic idolatry. I may not have known what I was talking about but the truth is still the truth. If God is not on the throne of our hearts, no amount of material wealth will satisfy. Perhaps this current crisis in the marketplace is all a corrective to the god of market-based living and a reminder that God is not mocked.
Crisis Brings Clarity
January 23, 2008 by thepracticalmystic
thesoulpurposedotorg 
“The breath of God is only one of the divine gifts that make us living souls; the other is dust. Most of our modern troubles come from our misunderstanding and misevaluation of this dust.” – Wendell Berry, SEX, ECONOMY, FREEDOM AND COMMUNITY. Quoted in the chapter “Household Economics” in PRACTICING OUR FAITH, Dorothy C. Bass, ed. (A good thought for Ash Wednesday.)
In the margin I wrote someone’s comment: “Incarnation–God become stuff; Materialism–stuff becomes God.
The concept of “God becoming stuff” is helpful. This was a mantra on Riuchard Rohr’s website a few weeks ago: “God is not a Being, God is Being itself.” It has helped me to see material things as part of God’s blessings, to see them as servants of God’s working in my own small sphere of influence. Remeber the time in our lives when we rejected all things material as an enemy ot a spirit directed life? It’s a subtle but helpful difference to see the material things around us as servants of God breathing through us rather than as enemies to be rejected.