This week at our Community Life Gathering we are talking about money, so I’ve been thinking about it more.  Jesus uses a bunch of different analogies to describe money in Matt. 6.  He says that the way we spend money is like a window into the soul.  How we spend our money reflects the well being of our spiritual state.

At New City Covenant we are trying to be a community of truth and grace.  We want to be honest and truthful about following Jesus, and we want to make room for grace when we all fall short of it.  I imagine that means we become significantly more transparent, especially around the issue of money.  Wouldn’t it be powerful if we shared our financial situation with those around us?  Wouldn’t it be freeing to talk to a small group about upcoming purchases we planned to make?  If they knew our net worth and how we spent our money, they could help us make decisions in submission to God’s will.

I’m not advocating for anything more than transparency.  I think the secretive-ness of our finances isolates us from one another and from God.  Spending money is hard, and we need the wisdom of God that comes through the wisdom of the community.  This is especially true when buying a house.  As Mary and I look at houses and mortgages and down payments, I would love to be able to bring others into this decision with us.  I would love to be able to say to people close to me: here’s what my salary is.  Here’s how much I have in my stock account.  Here are all my debts.  What do you think is reasonable?  What is a reasonable amount of money to spend on a house.  This is seriously hard and scary, but I think it’s worth it.

I look forward to our community growing into a place of truth and grace.  I look forward to becoming a place where this sort of transparency helps us connect with God and hear his wisdom in our lives.

We all want to be happy.  The other night I pursued happiness in my third helping of french toast (yeah, I said night; we were having brinner ).  The sticky, sweet goodness of french toast covered with syrup was delightful…in that moment.  But not long after dinner, I felt awful.  I had way over done it, and my blood sugar must have been through the roof.  I even had a hard time sleeping that night because of all the sugar my body was still trying to process.

I indulged in something that made me happy — sugar — but it didn’t last.  It tasted good, but it left me feeling lethargic and lazy.  There are similar temptations in house buying.  There is the fancy master bedroom suite that screams at us, “you need this!”  There is that extra feature in the kitchen that promises to make life so much easier.  There is that extra bathroom that means I’ll never have to walk more than 15 steps to a toilet once I’m inconvenienced by pressure in my lower bowels.  There are so many things in a house that can make my life just a little bit more comfortable.  And after you look at houses for a while, these nice little features that promise to add a little more to your quality of life become must haves.  They become things that you need in order to be happy.  They are no longer add-ons, they are essentials.

But the sort of happiness they bring, like my sugar high, seems fleeting.  The initial excitement of having this nice feature eventually becomes pedestrian.  The nice feature becomes commonplace — it simply becomes the place I sleep, the room in which I eat, or my crapping confinement.  The happiness passes, and I’m just left with a mortgage payment.

Instead of sugar-high happiness, Paul says the gospel offers us the opportunity to find contentment in any and every circumstance:

I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.  I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. Phil. 4:11-13

If contentment is available to me in any and all circumstances, then it’s available to me in any and every house.  There is nothing that I “must have” in a house to be happy, and there is nothing that I “need” to be in a house in order for it to be livable.  Contentment is not conditional on house amenities, so the house buying principle that emerges is:  comfort does not equal contentment.  As I look at houses, I’m going to remind myself of this so that we’re not swayed off purpose or out of our price range because we feel like we need to have the extra feet in the floor plan or the fancy features in our everyday living spaces.

1. “We spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($100 billion) than on higher education ($99 billion).” pg. 13
2. “nearly 30 percent of Americans buy Christmas presents for their pets; 11 percent buy them for their neighbors.” (pg. 13)
3. “In 1986, America still had more high schools than shopping centers.  Less than twenty years later, we have more than twice as many shopping centers (46,438) as high schools (22,180).” (pg. 13)
4. “Americans now spend six hours a week shopping and only forty minutes playing with our kids” (pg. 14)
5. The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota is “America’s number one visitor attraction.” (pg. 15)
6. “The average American household carried about $9,000 in credit card debt during the year 2002, for a total of $764 billion.  Even college students average $2,500.  Total American credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s.” (pg. 20)
7. “Current bankruptcy rates exceed those experienced during the Great Depression.” (pg. 20)
8. “There are now more than 30,000 self-storage facilities in the country, offering over 1.3 billion square feet of relief for a legion of customers starting home businesses, combining households, getting organized after a move, or just unable to stop buying.  The industry has expanded fortyfold since the 1960s, from virtually nothing to $12 billion annually, making it larger than the U.S. music industry.” (pg. 32)
9. “Spending by … American children recently began growing by a torrid 20 percent a year” and “stands at about $670 billion today (more than the U.S. military budget of $418 billion)” (pg. 55)
10. “In 1984, kids four to twelve spent about $4 billion of their own money.  This year, they’ll spend $35 billion.  Marketing to children has become the hottest trend in the advertising world.” (pg. 55)
11. “From 1980 to 2004 the amount spent on children’s advertising in America rose from $100 million to $15 billion a year” (pg. 55)
12. “The average child gets about seventy toys a year.” (pg. 55)
13. “Wal-Mart imports 10 percent of all America’s total imports from China, and if it were a country, it would rank ahead of Great Britain and Russia in total imports.” (pg. 66)
14. “Since 1950, the amount of land in our communities devoted to public uses — parks, civic buildings, schools, churches, and so on — decreased by a fifth, while the percentage of income we spend for house mortgages and rental payments increased from a fifth to a full half” (pg. 70)
15. “The rate of clinical depression in the United States today is ten times what it was before 1945.” (pg. 77)
16. American college students “now spend nearly $6 billion a year on booze, more than they spend on all other beverages and their books combined.” (pg. 78)
17. “In 1979, people who earned incomes of more than $1 million (in 1991 dollars) gave 7 percent o their after-tax incomes away.  Twelve years later, that figure had dropped to less than 4 percent.  This, at a time when advocates of sharp cuts in government welfare programs suggested that private charity would make up much of the difference.” (pg. 82)
18. “Average CEO pay has continued to increase at double-digit rates — by 27 percent in 2003.  By 2000, CEOs earned 475 times what their average workers made (at financially ailing Delta Airlines, the gap was 1,531 to 1!), up from 40 times as much in 1980 and 84 times as much in 1990.” (pg. 84)
19. “In three studies with 140 adolescents, Ryan and colleague Tim Kasser showed that those with aspirations for wealth and fame were more depressed and had lower self-esteem than other adolescents whose aspirations centered on self-acceptance, family and friends, and community feeling.” (pg. 115)
20. “On average, we gulp about a 55 gallon drum of soft drinks every year, eat 150 fatty pounds of meat annually, and ingest the equivalent of 53 teaspoons of sugar every day.” (pg. 120)