HISTORY/CONFESSION

The following is a confession of sorts, and also a clarification of family history.

You grew up watching your parents struggle with money. Although we always had food and shelter, there were often tense times, fearful times when you were small. All through your growing up, your mom and dad were fearful, tense, guilty, angry, petty and argumentative… and much of this was rooted in fears about money.

Allow me to elaborate. I hear all of you discussing and idealizing simplicity as a lifestyle…getting away from grindstone-style labor for “the man” and amassing possessions to move toward labor that is connected with others in significant and natural ways.

Believe it or not, this was once your parents’ ideal. We not only tried for this, but we had a measure of success at it. We planted and tended large gardens, canned (300-some jars a year) and froze our own food, and made as much from scratch as possible. We bought milk from our friend's cow. For the first half of our marriage, I wore hand-me-down dresses and made some of your clothes while buying everything else at garage sales. I felt noble that we all looked different than everyone else.

All of our furniture was given to us or made by your dad…and we were given everything else, including vehicles and your bikes. During the first seven years of our family, years in which we had five children one after the other and you were all small, we went on dates about twice a year. We got away to the coast only a couple of times in those years. And also during these times, we made a point of not amassing possessions. It seems as I look back that we honestly owned not one thing of any value.

And we were proud of that fact! For both of us, the message we received growing up was that poverty was a sign of other-worldliness and godliness and that self-sufficiency was the safe and wise way to live. It sounds kind of ironic, but it’s true. We made choices to not pursue money, eschewing saving for retirement and turning down offers to pay for further education for your dad. We were proud of succeeding at not being materialistic in contrast to the shallow world around us.                  (Here are some of you in the clothes I made...)

But gradually as time went on, the truth of our situation began to dawn on us. First of all, because of our ideals, we did not have grace for our situation like we did for others that were God-directed. In short, this was not God’s plan for us, but our own ideal. As we had more and more little children, they began to have needs that were not being met. And we both felt we were working 24-7 with no break in sight …ever. 

Living this way is exhausting, because you are doing what those around you do not have to. There is little fellowship in the way we did this. For instance, I had all four of you older children in tennis shoes that I had to tie every morning. Believe it or not, it was a major chore, complicated by the fact that Joel freaked out about his every morning and I had to put them on several times to get them right, with no wrinkles in the socks. I remember mentioning this (with sort of a complaining pride, no doubt) to the women in church in Philomath. One of the women innocently asked me why I just didn’t get Velcro shoes and make my life easier. I told her I couldn’t afford to buy my kids new shoes. Those women looked at me with a mixture of pity and unbelief… not because I was too poor as I claimed, but because I was evidently stuck in a corner by my ideals. I was determined to have all these kids, and in their minds I was determined to do it in the most labor-intensive self-sacrificing way possible.

It came out in different ways. For your dad, he struggled with temptations to escape into a world of lust. He spent money on this that I didn’t know about at first, and it eventually brought us into more and more debt out of which we could not escape. Guilt and escapism led him to make a lot of poor financial decisions which were not based on faith. For him, it seemed there were only two choices: the “right “ one he grew up with was to never spend or invest in anything for the foreseeable future, and everything else was wrong. When he had legitimate needs or direction that seemed opposite of this, he would assume he was wrong, get confused and “give Up” again…

 For all the time I have known him, Tony has said , “I need to look at our finances every day and write down what I’ve spent.” And then he would not do it and feel condemned. He was taught that a careful scrutiny and control of money was next to godliness. Now, please hear me. I’m not saying it is wrong to look at how much you have and communicate about it if that’s how the Lord directs you, but I am saying that this was NOT what the Lord has called us to, and it is just recently that both of us can acknowledge this. He has directed us to I Corinthians 9, where the Lord talks about scattering abroad the seed. There is a freedom, even a carelessness in these verses which astounds me:

   I Corinthians 9: 6-11 Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. ⁸ And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. ⁹ As it is written:

   “They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor;
   their righteousness endures forever.
 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. 

For me, a person who values quality time, spelled out as an adult to talk to- this was an almost never possibility. The deepest needs of my heart were not ever being met, and I could look ahead and it didn’t look like they ever would be. I was working very, very hard to reach all of my ideals and I was proud of all we were accomplishing, but I was absolutely miserable. I could not enjoy my kids because I was so busy doing all the things a good mom and wife should. How backward is that? I mostly remember being too busy to look anyone in the eye, have a happy conversation, or to even ever smile.

Probably the first break in all this was the first van we bought, which led to our home.  We bought it “by faith” even though we went into debt a small amount for it. It seemed the Lord showed it to us, and we had to break our standards (we were against debt) We were beginning to walk in the spirit and to realize that we had been worshipping the self-righteous lack of money through self-sufficiency.

But almost as soon as we got our "miracle" van and house, we took off with using credit cards and maxed out several of them. If we had stayed in faith during that time, we would have been able to roll our high mortgage over in only a couple of years, and reduce our very high payment to a reasonable one. Instead, when that time came, we were taking on a second mortgage and another payment to cover our debt. 

Even then, God was very gracious to pay off our debt completely through the fiasco of losing our driveway and getting it back. We began to invest in you children and others in bigger and bigger ways. We began to invest in ourselves through God's direction. We had to overcome, step-by-step, different hang-ups we had about what is truly spiritual, permissible, Godly, powerful.

My belief is that we need a bigger freedom in this than we've ever had. Your dad, for instance, was raised to believe that he was/should be his family's failure. It was his given role, to cover the deep pain of his parents. His brother was to be the success. If Tony succeeds and makes the amount of money a man of his caliber should make, he has to give up that role and (supposed) loyalty to his family of origin. Up until this point, he has only knowingly succeeded at work enough that it does not violate this supposed loyalty. He needs deliverance. Please pray for this. Some of you may sense this same temptation to sabotage success in your lives. This generational sin must be broken if we are to really reach our potential in the Spirit!

In my life, I am still very tempted to perform, be self-reliant, and disobey the Holy Spirit when He asks me to take steps of faith. I am worried about the judgment of others (especially you children and church people) and want to hide my choices because they look so un-spiritual in my eyes. I need freedom! Some of you may sense this same temptation as well. Here are some truthss about money that I am learning:

THE OVERLOOKED IMPORTANCE OF MONEY

 Money became to me:

• A way to save time, so I could have a conversation with an adult

• A way to give love, because special expenditures (say, for a new shirt or an ice cream) were speaking deep value to my husband and children. Incidentally, God gave "GIVING" as one of the expressions of His grace gifts. He truly values people giving to each other in financial and other ways.

• A way to exist in the culture around us, rather than being hopelessly different as I once was and screaming MY DIFFERENCE with my clothes, hair, jewelry.     I see now that God has a calling and setting for each life. He put Joseph in a prison and then in a palace in Egypt. In each case, he had to dress, act, and speak the part with integrity. I hope, dear ones, that your personal goal is to always be wholeheartedly the person God made you to be in the environment HE calls you to, and that if He gives you a platform for the gospel, you will stand on it unashamed.

• A way to be the giver and not always the receiver, because when it came right down to it, our self-sufficiency turned out to be well-disguised dependency on others who invested in us. As the poorest people in every situation, we were always the ones given to. If Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t given us cars when they were done with them, for instance, how proud could we have been that we never bought a car? Both sets of parents and friends have substantially helped us in many ways over the years, and we are so grateful.

• A way to major on what was truly important and express personal value and choice. When I finally decided that I could no longer use hand-me-down books for home schooling because my kids needed better quality of my choosing, then I was able to pray for, receive, and invest in the $5,000 curriculum we use to this day.

 It is obvious to all of you that money has been a big painful issue all the time you were growing up. Let me just say that what you did not know was that we allowed ourselves to be robbed again and again by immoral choices and opportunistic spirits. Please learn from us: If you invest God’s money where it doesn’t belong (perhaps in something against His nature and will such as the subjugation of women or greed or hoarding ) then HE will not necessarily give you more to invest in that endeavor. I know that the world is full of people who seem to be prospering in their evil, but we are God’s children. We were subject to His loving correction and rebuke. And we got it. And you paid the price, because we had that much less to invest in you.

  

Which brings us to today. We have made so many truly scary mistakes with money, and yet we still have a house to live in and food to eat, despite having so many children and not so great income. God has been very gracious. 

       NOW God has called us to invest and stretch out more. We believe He showed us to put many of the kids in sports, for instance, but the gas that it takes to get everyone where they need to go is an astronomical amount. Here is a situation where money is what is needed to insure a valuable learning experience. And there are so many needs that are similar. We believe God has directed and will provide, but so far we are getting further and further behind, for the past six months especially. We just need to see why this is so, and whether there is something in the way of God’s provision being evidenced.

Thanks for reading this, and for your prayer. We long to see God's blessing in every way pour out over our family! Here are some verses I heard this morning:

Jeremiah 33:3

While Jeremiah was still confined in the courtyard of the guard, the word of the LORD came to him a second time: ² “This is what the LORD says, he who made the earth, the LORD who formed it and established it—the LORD is his name: ³ ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’

 Jeremiah 29 :11

I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. ¹¹ For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. ¹² Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. ¹³ You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ¹⁴ I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity.^[b] I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”