Anyway, yesterday we celebrated 3 years of being married. It's hard to believe that it's only been three years, since we went through so much in that short time. It's been an incredible adventure, and I am so blessed beyond words to have him as my partner through life.
This past year has been an especially exciting one! We have built our company and last year we made more in a 12 month period than either of us know what to do with.
Which brings me to the subject of this blog.
Every year, I look back at how the year has gone and what adjustments we need to make in order to end up where we want to be five, ten, or fifty years down the road. So far, I've noticed that every year we seem to learn one major lesson that makes everything better moving forward.
Do you remember watching that Spider Man movie with that Toby guy as the star? Most of us do. And most of us also remember his uncle's famous words: "With great power comes great responsibility."
Well, folks. Money is (among other things) power.
Let me start, right now, by telling you that money isn't evil. And people who have money aren't inherently evil nor do they magically become evil when the money touches their bank accounts. But money reveals where you need to do some work in your life, because it is a type of power. Someone once said that power corrupts and I don't think that's entirely true. What power does do is opens up the doors to corruption, and you have to choose to walk through them, or to firmly shut them.
Money is power, and it opens doors. It's the power to have what you've never been able to have before. It's the power to live as you want to, and if you're not careful that can get dangerous fast.
What do I mean?
Well, let's take a look at Jared and I. We're good people. We're Christians. We have morals and guidelines and even a few personal rules that we live by and those keep us mostly safe. And yet, we are human and as such we do have those areas in our life where an open door can cause problems.
Last year we made more money than we know what to do with and this year we don't have a penny in savings because we never bothered to save any of it. What did we do?
For one, we ate.We ate a lot.
We didn't just eat, we ate restaurant burgers and delivery pizza and lots of ice cream on a pretty regular basis.
As a result, we got fat.
Today Jared and I are working hard to shed the extra weight that we stacked onto ourselves when we had more than enough and weren't managing it carefully enough. As people who grew up poor, we were completely enamored with the ability to have dinner and dessert every night without ever having to walk into a grocery store or cook. And not only did we foist all of our food-related work onto someone else, but we ate way more than we should have at just about every sitting.
Gluttony and sloth came into our lives. Those are called "deadly sins" for a reason.
Second, we helped people.
That's a good thing, right? Helping people is good!
Well, yes and no.
Yes, because reaching out to people is what we are called to do. But no, because sometimes the ways that we help people don't really help them after all.
With our extra money we gathered quite a few people who we were hurting by helping. One of my mentors calls them projects, another calls them strays. Whatever you call them, these are the people who are flat broke on the inside. Whether they have money or not (and sadly they usually don't) these are the people whose ways of dealing with their lives and with other people constantly land them in bad waters.There's a difference between hitting a bad situation through no fault of your own and throwing yourself headfirst into bad situation stew. When you're first meeting a person they can look pretty identical. In both cases the person is in a bad situation and is frustrated by it. They say things like "If I could just find a job" or "I'm just a little short right now" or "I don't understand why he's being such a jerk."
It's very important, when you're in a position to be able to help people, that you use discernment with who you offer your help to.
We didn't.
Excited to be able to help someone and make a difference in their lives, we picked up the first few people who crossed our paths and were in bad situations. Having been someone who made bad choices and landed in a bad situation and needed someone else's help to get back on my feet, I had a soft spot for twenty-something girls who just seemed to be having a rough time of it. Whenever I came across one I became convinced that I had to throw all of my resources into helping them.
In each of these situations we tried to forge friendships with the people we were helping, tried to offer them help in a way that was un-controlling and uplifting. In each of these situations the people drained us of our resources, caused stress and strife between us, and then cut all ties from us because of lies they had fabricated in their own minds about who we were and what we were about. The result of our attempt to help was wasted money, time, and emotional energy, and a growing wedge in our marriage that we had to work very hard to pull back out.
All because we didn't use discernment in who we helped. I saw people in a situation I could empathize with and I convinced myself that I was the only person in the world who could understand and help them, so I rushed in without counsel or even prayer.
That is called pride. It's another of those deadly sins.
You see, having the power of money and not guarding ourselves carefully enough against ... well, ourselves ... we fell victim to those deadly sins. They're called "deadly" for a reason, my friends. They kill what is good in your life. Once the deadly sins have entered your life there is a heck of a lot of prayer and hard work that you have ahead in order to recover from the damage you've done to yourself.
Fortunately for us, it only took giving too much help to a few people for us to realize what we were actually accomplishing was far from our goal. And after reaping the "rewards" of a year of sloth and gluttony, we were receptive when God brought someone into our lives to help us recover from that damage.
Year three has been very exciting, with more growth and prosperity and blessing than we have ever experienced. And I feel so fortunate that in the midst of all of this, now is the time when we learned that we need to be ever vigilant with what we have. As we gain more influence in its many forms, we become more able to affect more people around us. This means that as we gain this influence, we have to be ever more careful with the way we are using it! I'm glad that we learned this lesson at a time when we do not have children to follow our gluttony or be hurt by our willingness to indiscriminately allow people into our inner sanctum. And now, having seen the truth of how careful we do need to be with our power as we gain more of it, we are better prepared to truly help people.
The lesson for year 3 was to be careful with the power God gives us. I'm really excited to see what's coming in year 4!
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