November 2006

I heard recently from an estate-planner for elderly wealthy people who said that his clients were consistently miserable.  And this wasn't your garden-variety misery that stopped with them.  Their children were miserable!  In anticipation of the imminent death of Old Moneybags, the jockeying had begun.

How do you feel about money?  Let me guess: you're in favor of it, as are we all.  But, I'll tell you, both the risks and the rewards of it are becoming more evident to me as I age and as I see how it mysteriously ruins some people and yet gives only upside to others.

A few years back, a friend passed on a book by a psychology professor named Tim Kassar called The High Cost of Materialism which detailed study after study about the correlation between money and happiness.  What the book argues, in laborious detail, is that money does demonstrably improve our happiness-if we lack basic necessities.  After that, however, studies in dozens of cultures say that additional money doesn't make us any happier-we just adapt to it as our new reality and move on.  The kicker in these studies, though, was the next point: a desire to become rich is positively correlated with misery.

That one got me.  I'm a pastor-obviously I didn't get into this for the money.  But, deep down, did I someday hope to be rich?  (By which, of course, on any standard of the world I mean super-rich.  I'm American, so by definition I've already hit the status of the merely "rich.")  Of course I did!  Did I hope there was an unknown great-uncle getting ready to leave me his controlling interest in Exxon?  Yes I did.  So, like those rich people getting estate planning advice, was I on the road to torment?

Here's a bit of religious trivia I'll bet you didn't know.  You could make the case that Jesus taught more about money than about any other topic, more than about prayer or heaven and hell.  As if understanding this key area of life would empower our futures more than any other single thing.

Why is that?  You can wonder if Jesus sees money as a spiritual entity in and of itself-as the thing we're tempted to bank our futures and happiness on.  And if we do this, we find that money is a vengeful god that demands sacrifice and service-checking the Dow Jones by day and wondering if someone somewhere is ripping us off by night. 

But what's the alternative?  It seems to come in two forms: (1) deciding to trust something other than money, and (2) being generous (as, I suppose, an in-your-face to the evil money god).  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that if we turn our focus to doing God's will, God himself will take responsibility for getting us enough money.  And if we give so freely that even we have trouble keeping track of how much we've given away, we won't regret it.

By percentage, the richer people get, the less they give away.  But I've heard some great stories of rich folks who've grown to understand the things I've just said and have decided to put them to the test.  RG Letourneau, who founded John Deere tractors, famously gave away ninety percent of his income and yet still died as one of the richest men in the world.  The estate planner I mentioned earlier, seeing the misery of his clients, decided to take a similar tack and has had similar results. 

This happens so frequently in my circles that we've come up with an axiom: generous people are happy people.  And-what do you know?-if you look more closely, the root of the word "miserable" is "miser." 

You-yes you!-can be rich.  Or at least you can feel rich and isn't that, after all, the whole ballgame?  All it evidently takes is some refocused trust for your future and a level of generosity that brings the occasional gulp.