What’s In Your House? Weekly Link-up
This week’s writing prompt for the weekly link-up:
What do you see in your bank account? What’s the potential for creativity there? How might God use your bank account for great purposes?
My response:
The other day my daughter was flipping through the duplicate copies left in my check book. She read them aloud: “Christ Pres, School, Christ Pres, Christ Pres, School.”
Some of those were receipts for tithe checks and our Wednesday night dinners at church. The school checks had been written for field trips, supply fees, and school lunches.
All of a sudden, I got kind of proud and said to myself, Wow! When you look through my check receipts, you mostly see church and school. I love that. We are spending our money on God’s work and education. Yes! Just as it should be.
Then, my pride slapped me in the face as I remembered that the check receipts only tell a small portion of the story of our bank account. In actuality, I use my check card for the majority of purchases, which were not reflected in the bundle of duplicate receipts.
A glance at the true account expenditures list online and I quickly notice a different picture. Lots of food. And utilities. And a few red negative balances, too.
Ouch. Our bank account picture is not as pristine as I had thought only a few minutes before.
This week we are looking in our houses through the filter of our bank accounts. I know you’ve heard the notion that a glance at our checkbook will quickly tell us where our hearts really are. It’s true. If we care about something, we will spend money on it.
Money has become a difficult subject for me during the last few years. We’ve not had a lot of it and we’ve had a boatload of bills and debt. I have worried, worked, cried, and become apathetic; I have gone through every emotion possible. I think I’m finally coming out on the other side (though still struggling with money and all its complexities), but with one distinction. I now see how I idolize money, what having a lot of it means to me, and how that chips away at my trust in God.
More than anything, I’m working on being more generous with that which God has given me. Despite not having much extra money at all, I’m actually feeling called to a more generous attitude regarding what we do have.
I listened to a recent episode of MoneyLife Crown Financial Ministries. If you have a half hour, you should listen to it. I particularly appreciated this excerpt:
Financial freedom is not ordering your life where you have all the money to do whatever you want to do. It’s ordering your life so that God has total freedom to “spend” you. You’re free from the world’s purposes for the money God has entrusted to you. And until you experience that freedom, you’re not even on the path. … A faithful steward is one who has crossed that chasm from the world’s purposes for their resources to God’s purposes and you become a leader. You show other people the way to live in God’s economy. You’re not caught up trying to perfect living in man’s economy.
—Chuck Bentley, 3/3/11, MoneyLife, “How to Hear, ‘Well done!’”
Your turn now …
- Post your link to this week’s writing challenge below.
- Link back here on your blog.
- Visit some of the other posts and leave some words of encouragement for the writers in their comments’ sections.
Thanks for participating!
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Writing prompt for next week:
What do you see in your vehicle? What’s the potential for creativity there? How might God use your vehicle for great purposes?
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