Foolish Generosity

Proper use of money has been on the mind a lot.
Mom loves me so she made and mailed cookies.  Don't get me wrong.  The cookies were great, but... shipping cost $8.75.  That could have paid for two more batches of cookies.  To be more efficient with her giving she could just Paypal me all that money and email me the recipe, then I could make them myself and have 3 times as much cookie love right?!
I think we all know that would kind of defeat the point.  She didn't send those cookies in order for me to experience the maximum amount of delicious cookie possible (oatmeal cookies with white chocolate chips!).  She sent them because she loves me and wanted me to feel her love despite being so far away.  And yes, it worked.  I felt quite loved when I came home and found them on my doorstep :) :) :D
Shipping cookies almost 600 miles is a mildly extravagant way to communicate love.  It's the extravagance that carries the important part.  When God works in us and through us, he wants to communicate his love to us, and he also wants to communicate his love through us to others.  In both cases he likes to do so extravagantly.  It's not always the most financially efficient or "responsible" way, but God has no shortage of resources so that's not something he has to concern himself with.
When we feed the poor, we could do so by buying bread and peanut butter in bulk, whipping up a bunch of sandwiches and then handing them out.  Alternatively we could take a homeless man out to eat.  Both approaches get the job done.  One approach is financially responsible, while the other is not.  One approach (the financially irresponsible one if it wasn't clear), shows extravagant love, while the other does not.  Of course with the sandwiches you could impact more lives with the same amount of money, but at the same time, remember God has money, and when you follow his direction to take a homeless man out to eat, God will bless that and provide the means to make it happen again.
Maybe this addresses the concern of my previous post.  Spend our money extravagantly on the pleasure of serving God, and because it is not a zero sum game, God can multiply our efforts and allow large impact.
hmm.. sorry, mind is spinning wildly so forgive the chaos.  Maybe it's like this:

$10 feeds 2 people normally, or 1 person + extravagant love.  I have $10 so the choice is between impacting 1 person or 2.
Wrong.
Because maybe, when I choose the 1, God redirects $50 my way so that I can actually impact 6 people extravagantly.

Sooo... I think the trick is being aware that this can happen.  God likes operating like this. Most importantly though, just obey.  Don't question God when he defies common sense and says to just impact the 1 because you never know what he has up his sleeve.

Regret

Matthew 6:19-21
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Heaven is this earth in the future, when God returns and redeems this earth bringing it back to the way things were at the garden of Eden before the fall of humanity (not some place up in the clouds where we play harps, or even just a big worship service).  The idea of "being too heavenly focused to be any earthly good" is an idea that doesn't understand heaven and hasn't looked at the lives of history's most heavenly focused people.  If life in heaven is basically life in a redeemed earth, then many of the things we enjoy here and now we can enjoy there.  We don't need to waste our time getting as much pleasure today as we can.  There will be time for that in eternity.  Instead, seeing heaven ahead of us, we spend our time here doing the things we can't do in heaven; we rescue the world from sin, hopelessness, and brokenness.  Spending our time amassing wealth does us no good.  We leave it all behind.  Redeemed lives though come into the new heaven and new earth with us.  The stories of people who had clean water to drink because of our obedience to God will come to heaven with us.

In light of that, as our lives come towards their ends and we transition into eternity, will we regret the time wasted now on the eternally insignificant? (which things count as eternally significant would be another entire series of blog posts which I won't discuss right now).  This clip from the end of Schindler's List portrays the regret of a man who did so much but could have done more.  I don't know if he is right in reacting the way he does or not.  He seems to ignore the joy he could have from saving hundreds of people, to focus on the 12 he lost, but actually that sounds a lot like the good shepherd leaving his 99 sheep, to search out the one who was lost.

I don't believe God's goal is for us to live our lives in misery, but I also can't imagine him being thrilled when we let the lives of others slip by as insignificant in comparison to the pleasures we want to have fulfilled now.  I want to be able to justify spending money on me for things I like, but I'm struggling to put together any real argument that doesn't sound contrived, and just like an excuse to let me do what I want to do...  I could have sponsored a child for a month with the $19 I spent at lunch today.  There was value to my lunch with friends, but does it outweigh the alternative use of the money?  I am struggling to beat this question.

oh I'll make it I reckon.

God can always be counted on.  Did I say that before?  Here I am going through the month, money is just barely going to last me until my first paycheck and then my bank card stops working.  I managed to get it all scratched up in my wallet.  I go to the bank to deal with it and the lady at the counter says, “Okay, that’ll be 20€.”  ... “Okay,” said I, “hold that thought, I don’t have 20€ this second.”  So I go home in a rather stressed way inwardly, and get to counting all my loose change and doing a little math.  If I’m super careful, I could possibly make it to next friday when my paycheck comes, but who knows, it’ll be close. Then I remembered that Monday being a holiday, everything would be closed, including the bakery where I get some free food on Mondays for the week... Eating will be even a bigger challenge.  I think God tried to remind me that he was God and could handle it that evening when I was so stressed, but he said it in German and it didn’t really sink in. So I decide I can just maybe kind of afford the card, which I need actually to collect money when it does come so I can pay for my visa on next Monday.  Well I get to the bank all ready to buy a new card, and what should I find, but it’s a different lady who gives me a card for free, along with a case that will protect my card from future scratches!  With an extra 20€ in hand, I can undoubtedly make it through the week.  God has yet to leave me hanging.  Maybe I’ll start trusting him soon.

A Tale of Two Cities

I hope you all watched wishbone growing up. If you didnʼt you really missed out. Well
most of what I knew about Charles Dickensʼ A Tale of Two Cities I knew from Wishbone
and even that I remember very faintly. Their rendition was made all the more confusing
because a key in the book is that there are two men who look almost identical, but in the
Wishbone rendition one role is played by an man, and his doppelganger is played by
Wishbone (a dog), so I didnʼt realize they were supposed to look a like.


I just finished reading the book the first time. Absolutely brilliant. Charles Dickensʼ way
of introducing and developing characters and weaving their lives through each othersʼ is
fascinating. The incredible evil during the French Revolution is so vivid and so near,
both in time and space, just a few generations removed from us, one country away from
me where my cousin is now studying fashion (or actually just finished). Itʼs so hard to
imagine living under such oppression, leading to so much revenge and bloodshed, and
yet on this very planet, just out of earshot from most of us, there are still similar things
going on.


Another theme throughout the book is living a life that was worth it, not wasted,
remembered by posterity, unselfish, quiet heroism. We always feel though like such
acts of courage are of another time because none of my friends are on their way to La
Guillotine, but as noted just a paragraph earlier, Iʼm fairly sure that there are
opportunities in this world for us to risk our lives to make life better for those that are
suffering. It would really be a shame to come to the end of life and realize you had
been pretending that everything was good and just, and that no innocent were dying, or
poor were starving while your eyes were closed to it. In the story is seems so blatant,
as the Marquis de Monseigneur runs over a baby with his carriage and he drops $50 to the parents and
continues on his way to his summer cottage built of the oppression of the town in the
valley below it, whom he has taxed to itʼs starvation. Every luxury he has comes at the
expense of the abused. In our case we have a few layers of middle men to buffer us
from the poor that support our needs, but itʼs there nonetheless, and in our day of world
wide communication at our fingertips, ignorance is not an excuse.


Work hard and be profitable, but not to your own end. Pull those up underneath you
who have allowed you to rise in the first place and have woven your shoelaces by hand.
Sorry for getting all intense. Iʼm really scolding myself first and foremost. Read the
book to yourself, and keep some of those thoughts in mind. Even if it doesnʼt bring you
to the same place, it is at the very least brilliant literature and you wonʼt have lost
anything by reading it.


Iʼm still trying to figure out how this post fits with my post on JOY. I donʼt support living
in wretched misery so that you can save all the worldʼs poor (though I may come to that
conclusion before long, who knows?).


“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” - that would be a good sentence to finish my life with I think.

So a theme often on my heart is serving God well with my finances.  I definitely think God calls different people to do that in different ways.  For me, it definitely means not living extravagantly, and I haven’t felt like I have been living a particularly luxurious life.  God started poking at my lifestyle though a lot in this past week, and pointing out things in my life.  I was talking with another foreigner in a much less fortunate situation than myself.  She, her mom, and her daughter were living on 120€ a month from the government, and it sounded like that was really their only income besides some they could gather begging.  I thought I was being stingy when I budgeted 120€ for food my first month (the first month is more expensive because you’re stocking up on basic ingredients that will last a while, plus detergent, and toilet paper and all that jazz).

God pointed out to me that while I haven’t been super extravagant, depending on the standards you compare me to, the key was that I have always been living right up to the edge of my means.  God wants me to practice living under my means, even now when my means are very small.  I need to stop a habit that could be dangerous in the long run.  My mindset has been to look at what I have and then use it.  When I get a raise, I use it.  When I graduate and get a real job, I use more.  As I begin making more money, I begin to live extravagantly just by following the unextravagant pattern I’ve been living now of using all of my means.  I need to be able to have extravagant means without an extravagant lifestyle.  God pointed this out to me by throwing a forgotten 50€ visa expense at me.  Suddenly my food budget went down to 70€.  That means this month I am still living to the edge of my means, but through it all, God was able to point out this habit in my life so that when the money does begin to come in (hopefully at the end of the month) I might be able to continue living as I have this month, so that I may be a blessing to others with my coming abundance (I didn't even realize it was abundant until now).

Don’t let your lifestyle keep rising to your income.

Define your lifestyle and then do something awesome and unselfish when your income rises.

Ankunft und Alles

I think I already mentioned, but Irene put me off two days so here comes Wednesday, August 31st.

  

Anecdote 1:

On my way to the airport with my dear mother at 7:30.  I ate a banana on route, and just as I wanted to throw it curbside across a lane and a half of traffic, my mom goes and changes lanes to take the fun out of it.   It still flew into 3 pieces as the wind took it before hitting the ground though =)

Anecdote 2:

I fly to Newark, and with the rescheduling of my flight, I ended up in an ‘extra legroom’ seat.  Sadly it was about 1 hour in the air and hardly necessary.  The guy sitting next to me was about 65, turns out he’s flown to over 100 different countries and more than 3,000,000 miles.  That’s about 121 laps around the globe!  Over a million with Delta Airlines, and a million with Continental Airlines.  He says he likes Continental best.  I think I’ll keep flying Continental (regretting forgetting to register my last 3 flights on their frequent flyer program).

Antidote 3:

5 hour layover in Newark! I was sitting at a table for 4 with my chinese food and I see three people muttering in German, looking for a table in the packed food court.  I offered  the seats at my table and they joined me (it’s not peculiar in Germany to sit with strangers like it is in the States).  It was great to hear German again.  Turns out they were on their way to Vegas.  They were from Munich and should have had a Bavarian accent that I couldn’t understand, but they didn’t.  Despite the warnings I got from Osnabrückers last time I was in Germany, I have been able to understand everyone’s accents here just fine (well, admittedly a bit rusty, but otherwise fine).  Also, did you notice that I titled this section ‘Antidote’?  Sorry just messin’.  I’ll continue.

Anecdote 4:

I hate flying across the ocean.  It’s not the ocean per say that bothers me, more just that whole 8 hour in a plane thing.  As I’m boarding there, the flight attendant says ‘go there,’ pointing to the second row of first class.  I had just read on the website about first class seating reclining into a bed 6’3” long and was getting ready to be stoked.  When I asked for clarification, he meant that I should cross in front of that seat to get to the other aisle since my seat was over there =’(  Tragedy.  My seat didn’t even have the extra 5 inches of the previous flight. I watched TV shows for an hour, talked to the nice little German lady next to me for a minute (who was lucky enough to get hit by the hurricane on her visit).  Breakfast and dinner came and suddenly (well not really suddenly), with a few hours of sleep and a legion of goosebumps to my name, I arrived in Munich.  Note, somewhere between cold and sleep we passed from day 0 to day 1.

Breaking from anecdotes for a bit, I took a 30 minute flight to Nürnberg, jumped onto the subway for the city center (with 100 pounds of luggage), grabbed a train to Erlangen, and then found the right bus to get me near my apartment.  I walked the brief quarter mile and found the address I had written on notebook paper.

Anecdote 5:

I knock on the door, hear a shuffling upstairs, a window open, a head comes out of the window looking rather like Einstein with his wild gray hair, “Ryan? I’m Reinhard Völkel-Prohaska.  Just a minute, I’m taking a very important call.  I’ll be there presently.”  He then comes down in a bit, welcomes me, shows me around.  I’ll get to descriptions later.

Anecdote 6:

So I’ve made it to my appointment at the bank in Herzogenaurach (Herzo), the next town over where PUMA is located.  The young man helping my to open my account looked only slightly older than myself, was wearing one of the best looking suits I’ve ever seen in person, and had great English.  We decided to meet in English just so I wouldn’t miss any important details.  After the account is set up, he takes me to the teller to get me some cash, but some issue with my travelers checks she claims she can’t do it (and is quite obnoxious about it).  She was maybe 50, with dyed yellow hair (I think it was supposed to be blond).  They are bickering in German for a bit very fast and so I didn’t catch everything but she musters up her meanest voice and says something like “I’m very sorry, but I won’t do it!”  He steps it up immediately and says, “ I’m very even more sorry, because you have to do it!”  She turns away finally and gets my money.  With way too much cash in my pocket, I hurry back to my apartment to pay the landlord for the deposit and rent.  I grabbed some food from a nearby store, unpacked my things and hit the sack at 8pm, turned into day 2 and woke up at 8am.  Much needed since I’d only had 3 hours in the last 42 hours.

Day 2 is exploring the apartment, sorting out details with my landlord, skating 2 or so odd miles to the city center to get my bus pass (that PUMA is paying for, score!) that let’s me take all the buses in my city, Herzo, and anywhere in between.  Admittedly there is nothing in between besides 20 minutes of my life for twice a day, 5 days a week, for the whole next year.  It’s about $80 a month.  For those of you with cars, I assume it costs more than that?  Tried the scenic rout home, which was cool, for a while, until I was lost.  Fortunately I’d just acquired (Edward A. that word choice was for you) a map at the bus station and righted myself pretty quickly.  Longboards are the best thing ever for exploring.  Here are some of the sights along the way.  I’m pretty sure there were much more beautiful parts of the city, but theses are the pictures I took.  I’ll do more over the coming weeks.  Overall, a very lively and pleasant place.

Note: I don’t have internet, but I can get it for free at the mall in town so... I’ll be slightly less prompt than you’re used to.

Here is the air near Nürnberg.  Not the best location to shoot but it was more 

gorgeous than most country sides.

Here is my Landlord (Reinhard) with wife and Aunt.  

All three like wearing socks and sandals.

Here is the mall where I get internet.  Super nice.

 Walking down the street in the city center.

 The city hall, 'Rathaus Erlangen.'

 Playground in front of the Rathaus.

 Typical scene just outside of the city center.

On my way to getting lost.

Cool clock!

Radical.

"A wealthier man in our church family came to my office after we had been studying the story of the rich young man. He sat down, looked at me, and said point-blank, 'I think you're crazy for saying some of the things you are saying.' Then he paused, and I wasn't sure what direction this conversation was going to go. He continued, 'But I think you're right. And so now I think I'm crazy for thinking some of the things I'm thinking.'

For the next few minuets, he described how he was selling his large house and had decided to give away many of his other possessions. He talked about the needs he wanted to invest his resources in for the glory of Christ. Then he looked at me through tears in his eyes and said, 'I wonder at some points if I'm being irresponsible of unwise. But then I realize there is never going to come a day when I stand before God and he looks at me and says, 'I wish you would have kept more for yourself.' I'm confident that God will take care of me.'"

- David Platt in Radical p. 123

"So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity, and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church."

- David Platt in Radical p. 111

Above are two quotes from a book called Radical, which talks all about taking back faith from the American dream, that my dad is going through with his small group. I read the finances chapter. There are a handful of puzzle pieces related to where my life is going that are all starting to come together. This is a start.