Never Walked In High Heels

Money is a very strange thing. Money when you are a follower of Christ is an even stranger thing. It is too easy to fall into the trap which absolutely states that money is the root of all evil. For too many, every mouthful of food on your spoon is one that is taken out of the stomachs of starving children in some impoverished country. And thus, not having money becomes an opportunity for reverse snobbishness as much as having money does.

If we are to believe that a person’s value in not determined by his bank account, then it should also follow that his morality should not be determined by his poverty. At this point most of my friends say, “Well that’s easy for you to say because you’re considered extremely privileged by the rest of the world’s standards.”

If you can read this, you are extremely privileged too. There, what do we do now?

One of my dearest friends now lives in Russia. Her family has adopted 9 children and there are always rumors of more. My friend lives her life on a shoestring with so much class and honor she’d make Emily Post squirm. Devoting her life to serving others, she uses every bit of her advanced liberal arts education to make ends meet. When we pack for trips together I’m almost embarrassed by the lotions, the extra tires, the tools, the creams I need to pack to have a ‘normal life.’ And I can’t help but wonder when I crossed over into the realm of high maintenance?

And when she came to visit me in the UK for the first time, she came into my flat and said “wow, being here is so restful.” There wasn’t an ounce of judgment in it.

She doesn’t expect me to live like her. And in this lack of expectation she is the richest person I know. She knows first hand how hard living cheaply truly is. And because of this, she knows that I can’t walk everywhere or sew buttons back on my clothes. And while we both have the responsibility to use our resources as wisely as possible, that’s not going to look anything the same for both of us.

No two people are uniform, so why should their budgets be identical? If a family has a kid whose wheelchair can only fit into an Escalade, should they be ashamed to buy one? On what grounds should they apologize for it? For that matter, which one of their peers has to deem it a ‘need’ before it is the moral vehicle to buy? Or is it the government’s role to determine that?

For the moralist out there, it never says ‘money is the root of all evil.’ Maybe to you we seem the incongruous pair. God has given us very different resources to use wisely. There were many times that the Hebrews and the Gentiles both were aided by very wealthy people. These are the types of people who support my friend, who buy her groceries so she can serve without needing an income producing job at Starbucks. Without giving people like that, nobody could afford to take a vow of poverty.