Thursday, August 9, 2012

It's really his anyway


Blatantly ripping off the style in which Jen Hatmaker starts Month 6, here is my financial story in a nutshell:

Once upon a time there was a girl who thrived on thriftiness.  Then she got married and never was on the same page with her husband about finances.  Later they divorced.  And she was a single mom who survived on thriftiness.  One day she met a man who was on the same page with her regarding finances, and they got married and had two incomes.  And he took over the books (Thank the Lord!), and she never worried and obsessed about the budget for two years.  Which wasn’t a problem because they both overall had a conservative mindset toward buying things.

Until one day she saw how much they spent on food in a month.  And she just about choked.

Ahem.

So my plan for spending week is to make a budget for the after-bills money.  I said I was going to do it three weeks ago.  And the week after.  And in the car on the way to my cousin’s out-of-state wedding. 

And I didn’t.

It’s not that I don’t know how to make a budget.  Believe me, I could make several variations of a budget based on whichever financial guru’s method you want.  And it’s not that I don’t know how to scrimp and save to stretch a dollar to make the food budget work.

But I don’t want to go back to that dark place of agonizing over every penny spent and freaking out over spending a few bucks (or cents) without going through mental acrobatics in order to justify the expenditure.

On the flip side, I do not want to be the girl who “eats” her money.  (That’s expensive poop.)   Or the girl who is so selfish in her spending priorities that she neglects those in need.

Throw into the mix that this month I get my last teacher’s paycheck and we are no longer a two-income family—so now we’ve decreased income and increased time.  I don’t consider myself an extravagant spender, but I could still do some serious damage without boundaries.

Which is another way of saying I need to make a budget.

But unlike the budgets I’ve made before, I want this one to have the end in mind of taking care of my family well and caring for others well—setting reasonable limits to our self-spending for the sake of living out what Christ called us to do.   And when you approach it from that perspective, a budget brings life, not death.

I started writing this last night, and let me tell you that every inch of me was kicking and screaming like a spoiled child resistant to actual work and change.

And then in Bible study my friend talks about God reaping out of what is His to begin with anyway.

And the word God gives me is overflow.

And I think that God is trying to tell me to be at peace that He provides more than enough.  God is asking me to use the overflow for His glory, not my own selfish end.  Which is still admittedly uncomfortable and different from a culture which says, “store it all up for yourself, you worked for it, you deserve it”—neglecting to give glory and respect to the God who gave us the ability to even earn it in the first place.

Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God.  Ecclesiastes 5:19

I'm going to go write that budget.

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