My experience with money is probably different than yours.
With no money to my name—zero dollars—I made an offer on a million dollar piece of real estate and bought it. Many people don’t understand how that works. Yes, I was part owner of a million dollar piece of property. But that didn’t make me rich. It just meant I had partners, I had debt, and I had risk—if anything went wrong, I would go bankrupt and lose everything.
I’ve had the experience of sitting in swanky downtown offices with high-priced attorneys discussing how we would obtain $35 million in funding to turn our million dollar property into something spectacular. I’ve also had the experience of getting my food at a food pantry because I didn’t have any money to buy groceries. Sometimes both those experiences occurred on the same day. (By the way, the $35 million never came together; we ended up selling the property for a modest profit.)
I’ve had a middle class government job where I received a regular pay check that I needed to budget to make sure we had funds to pay our bills. And I’ve been self-employed—sometimes making $75 or more an hour, sometimes working for months without earning a cent.
I’ve been homeless. I’ve gone bankrupt. I’ve been debt free, and I’ve been heavily in debt. More times than I can count, I’ve not had money to pay the rent or the mortgage, but—miraculously—that money became available at the last moment.
I’ve bought groceries for others, and others have bought groceries for me. I’ve been the recipient of great kindness, and I’ve been ripped off for thousands and thousands of dollars.
I’m grateful for these life experiences because they’ve allowed me to see something about the heart of God that I might otherwise have never seen. Over the next few posts, I’d like to share those thoughts with you.
Image of woman on bench adapted from an image by PetteriO, Flickr, Creative Commons
