Hope in hard times

Hope and hard choices
Key verse: Esther 4:14. “And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
The baby-faced “personal banker” clicked another key on his computer. “We could put it into bonds,” he said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “But bonds aren’t doing well either. Or you could park it in a CD and wait till things turn around again. I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Bailey.”
Sign of the times, I thought as I put away what was left of my stock portfolio. “It’s okay,” I said. “Hey, how about we talk again in six months. It’s okay.”
I never thought I’d end up comforting my financial adviser. But this past year has brought a host of “I never thoughts” to the American people. Everything we thought we ever knew about money is obsolete, and the new rules haven’t been formulated.
Is God trying to tell us something? And who’s listening?
Personal worst
My husband David and I came to family financial management from vastly different backgrounds. He was the middle child of eight, raised on a hardscrabble farm. He got the leftovers, when there were leftovers to be had. I had a comfortable suburban upbringing. (My Internet name, a contraction for American Pie, is no joke.) When we married in 1977, the conversation began. And sometimes it was loud.
One month after marriage we set out on our first big adventure, traveling to a Western city for Dave to attend Bible college. There were few jobs in that city, and none I had the skills for. We lived in a subsidized apartment, received food stamps, and when two babies came in two years, we received WIC food vouchers. Borrowed maternity clothes got me through the pregnancies; baby showers and hand-me-downs got our children clothed. We didn’t buy a garment for our first daughter till she was a year old, and then we obsessed for an hour before plunking down the cash.
You’d think Dave would be the thrifty one, obsessing over every purchase, and I’d be the big spender. You’d think wrong. While Dave was responsible about money, he didn’t mind the occasional splurge such as going out to dinner. He had a strong faith, yes, and he knew God would provide for us. But he knew something else, something I didn’t realize until years later.
Dave had seen poverty up close. He’d surveyed it from every angle, walked around it, kicked its tires. He knew what it was to be filled and to go hungry. As with the Apostle Paul, it held no terrors for him.
But it was uncharted territory for me.
When Dave graduated, took a couple of pastorates and then returned to secular work, we thought things would improve. We thought wrong. My decision to stay home with our daughters was part of the financial stress. I did freelance writing around the girls’ schedules, and thought myself lucky to be with them. But there wasn’t a lot left over.
We learned the system, obtaining WIC and surplus food and applying for every sliding fee scale available. I asked for help with school trips, and sold a lot of candy bars. My mother bought my children’s clothing until the year she died. To this day, I don’t know anything about children’s sizes. If it fit and looked decent, they wore it.
During the lean years, we had help from an incredibly loving church family, from Colorado to New Hampshire. Church people gave us food, clothing, toys for the girls, cash. The church sent our girls to church camp and retreats. And church people gave us cars – twice. I don’t just mean that they paid our car payment, or our repair bill. They handed us the title to a working vehicle. Twice.
But I questioned, vigorously and often, why we had to go through this. We were tithers both of money and time. Over the years we’d applied for better jobs, worked harder at the jobs we had, tried moonlighting. Nothing took. Even our raises were eaten up by increased insurance premiums.
I finally gave up asking God why he let us stay broke, and started asking Him to use it. Over the years He did use me, in a small way, to bring succor and hope to other low-income families. When I prayed with a young mother down on her luck, she knew I knew. Food stamps? Free/reduced school lunches? Cardboard in your shoes so your kids could have new ones? I wasn’t just “rich church lady.” I’d walked where she walked, cardboard and all.
These occasions were scattered, a bit here and a piece there. I continued to ask Him to make sense of our experiences.
Finally we began to climb out of it. Dave had seniority at his job, and his paycheck reflected it. I was freelancing again, due to a company layoff, and making more money than when I “worked.” We were able to pay off some old bills, and keep up with current ones. We were able to help our loved ones. I had the Avon lady on speed dial. Life was, if not beautiful, at least do-able.
We had two good years. Years when we held our heads high, paid our own way, and watched the back bills shrink.
Then, the recession.
New rules and no rules
The stock market crashed, breaking into tiny pieces everything we thought we knew about money. It was no longer safe to put your money in a “balanced” portfolio, or to shift to bonds. Instead of CEOs jumping off the Empire State Building, we had CEOs escaping with fat nest eggs. Instead of companies going bankrupt, we had companies begging at the public trough and being helped, more than once. Put a portion of your earnings in the company 401K? We did, and watched both company and earnings die. Nothing worked any more.
And I was writing mostly for newspapers, an industry no one expected to survive.
I panicked. I fretted. In my head I reamed out the corporate executives and anyone else who allowed this to happen.
But there was one Person I didn’t dare accuse. As I sought His face, it became clear to me that He let this happen for a reason, and the reason is us. Maybe it’s also a wake-up call for the greedy, but I haven’t seen a lot of repentance there, sorry.
God knew about the executives, the market mistakes, and even the subprime mortgages, thought they’re not in Genesis. Let’s face it, He could have stopped it at any time. He didn’t cause the CEOs to become mad and eat grass – and if he did, it didn’t make World News Tonight.
Could the message this time be for His people? Could this be a time to show the world what we’re made of?
I’m not writing about the lilies of the field, the loaves and fishes, the cattle on a thousand hills, or even the widow’s jar of oil. You already know that He has not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread. But I think there’s more here we need to learn – and when we learn it, we need to show it to the world. It’s for such a time as this that we’ve been brought to this kingdom.
Life lessons
So how do we live in this new world, with its new rules or no rules?
God taught me things during the lean years, and also during the fat ones. Some of the lessons were about charity. Dave and I learned them from both sides, as receivers and more recently givers.
This past Christmas, we were in a position to do some modest holiday outreach. I spent carefully but happily, doing little things for people I thought needed a lift. One weekend Dave checked in with me and said, “So what did we end up doing for charity?”
I counted on my fingers. “There were those gift certificates for the boys next door – oh, but that’s not charity, they’re neighbors. And I gave Ramona at church a gift certificate to the supermarket, and got a gas card for Dottie, and we Secret Santa’d the Watsons – but that’s not charity either. Church is family.”
My eyes grew wide as I looked at him. We both realized that “charity” isn’t people you know. Charity is dropping a dollar in the Salvation Army plate or writing a check for hurricane relief. Charity is a good and necessary part of the Christian life. But when you give to people you know, it’s family.
And justice.
If you can give, do it graciously. If you have to receive, do it gratefully. Keep a low profile if you can, but recognize that that doesn’t fit all situations. For example, our car donors could hardly have gotten away with it anonymously. And try to keep everybody’s dignity – it doesn’t work without it.
I’ve also learned, as I’ve seen my newspaper writing career wither away, that you’re not what you do. While this used to be mostly a male problem, it’s one of the less desirable fruits of women’s lib. We all feel like we’ve lost ourselves when we lose our jobs.
If you have a good job you like that takes care of your family, I’m happy for you. I hope you keep it. But – and this lesson was hard-won for me – what you do is not who you are. Who you are, your authentic self, is who you are when you’re worshipping Him, whether that’s through your job, home or church.
But it goes even deeper than that. I think of my late friend Virginia, who was a vibrant 60-something when we first met her. She dressed well, read all the mission study books before everyone else, picked up other seniors for church, and had a dry wit spiced with a Maine accent. She spent her last years in a nursing home, a victim of Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t hear us when we came to visit, and we couldn’t understand what she said, so communication was poor at best. But even toward the end something that was essentially Virginia, something that age couldn’t alter, shone through her dimmed eyes. She was still in there somewhere, despite all the things she couldn’t “do.” And that’s the part of Virginia God took home to be with Him.
It’s not what you do.
Uncharted territory
In his second letter the Apostle Peter writes, “Since all things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be, in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” Francis Schaeffer put it more simply: “How should we then live?”
Who does He want us to be in the recession, and the years beyond?
Who does He want us to be when the jobs come back, when the market rallies, when we can all breathe again? And who does He want us to be if the unthinkable happens, and it doesn’t turn around?
I think He wants us to walk around the result, study it from all angles, kick its tires – and then move on, knowing that “for such a time as this,” we have been brought to the kingdom.
For whatever it takes.