Money n Security

You’ve probably seen the commercial where everyone is carrying a giant, carved out figure representing the amount of money in their retirement account. $1,257,833……..$43,756…..$2,356,988

The commercial is troubling in many ways but perhaps the most significant being that money and security never intersect. Yet the overwhelming, mind-numbing mantra of our culture is that money = security.

Some years ago I was stunned upon completing a 36-month bible study. I’d been so fixated on the money struggle that I decided once and for all to see what the Bible had to say about it. Anyone can extract a verse about money and imply that the Bible teaches such n such. But I wanted the entire thing.

The process is daunting. Take every conceivable word related to money (gold, silver, possessions, riches, rich, richer, poor, poorest, wealth, accumulation, greed, money, etc) and trace each word through the entire Bible, writing a brief phrase next to each verse to capture the core meaning.

Then comes the enlightening part. Picture a tepee village in your mind, each of varying size and shape. The village is formed this way. Each new concept found in a particular verse creates a new tepee. Let’s say our verse is, ‘the borrower is servant to the lender’. You form a tepee entitled ‘debt’. If our next verse talks about debt, we put it in the same tepee. If not, we form a new one. A tepee grows in size with each addition.

Would you like to guess as to the central, largest tepee when all the verses are compiled? Hint, the competition is not even close. This central tepee dwarfs all others: Uncertainty. Money transfers and cannot be secured. It goes through our hands like sifting sand.

Quiz. Who said this: ‘money is never really secure until you give it away’?