Every once in a while it is my constitutional obligation to write one very strange and out there blog post. Consider my obligation fulfilled for this year...
I was sitting on the staircase enjoying the bright sunshine when the brunette came and sat on me. She was very lithe and supple and quite enjoyable, but just as I was starting to get friendly, she left.
I was rather disappointed, so I joined my friend and fellow youth leader Sherman in the marketplace to look for swiss cheese. All of the packages were open and I just wanted to find about 20 slices that were roughly the same size - but, of course, the most I could find were about five decent sized scraps. It was very frustrating. But as I went to the checkout stand to pay, I was met by one of two sisters who handed me a brand new smartphone/laptop thingamajig.
I opened it up and watched a helicopter shot of a car chase through what appeared to be a cliffside auto wrecking yard. When the angle changed, the car skidded to a halt outside a two story home and two women jumped out in full combat gear. They started firing their machine guns into the house which was countering with return fire. But one of the women ducked behind the car and then produced a rocket launcher which she fired into the upstairs of the house. After the requisite explosion, the two sisters told me to close the laptop and join them on the beach.
As I joined the two sisters on the beach they explained that the movie I had just watched was a plan of their attack on a rival equestrian school up the coast. It was more of a fantasy, of course, than a reality. But this coastal area wasn't big enough for two rival equestrian schools. They wanted to know if I would support their school by becoming skin friends with them - skin friends being something akin to being so close that you were practically the other person's skin, like blood brothers or some such.
That was, of course, when I woke up.
One interesting side effect of anti-malaria medication is that it gives you REALLY bizarre dreams. However, about three weeks before I started taking anti-malaria medication I had a not so bizarre dream. I can't remember all the details, but I woke up with one very clear understanding. God wants me to start making money. Now, I know that such a revelation sounds completely self-serving (not that I'm against that ;) but the implication of the dream seemed rather profound to me.
First, the implication was that I was somehow preventing myself from making money - that I was somehow holding myself back from earning my maximum potential cash flow. I had to think about that for a while and I discovered that it was probably true. As much I grew up wanting to be a millionaire by the time I was 21 (I'm a little off the mark), I've never seen the acquisition of money as a goal unto itself. The million bucks was supposed to be a side effect of my fame and writing talent. So, I admit to worrying about the means of acquiring wealth without worrying about the actual wealth creation aspect. Or in other words, I worked on writing stories, not on selling stories.
Second, the implication was that I somehow equated having money with being, well, unchristian. I'm not entirely sure that was my thinking. It was probably more along the lines that those who were wealthy were that way because of un-christian acts - that the acquisition of wealth in and of itself was greed, pure and simple. Hence the idea that working hard was its own reward and if I made money doing it then that was great as well, but working strictly to make money was somehow impure.
You would think that with a revelation like that from God in a dream, I'd have jumped up and down and cried out, "Party! Party! Party!" But that wasn't the case. The revelation shocked me. Why does God want me to make money? Maybe it was just a dream after all.
Well, my skin friends, the answer is fairly clear to me after Kenya. There are things I want to do and things I need to do and they all require money - more money than I have and more money than I can possibly ever make. The time for being spiritually nourished by my poverty is at an end. God now trusts me with His resources and He expects me to go out and get a fair share and then distribute it to the less fortunate.
Some dreams are just crazy. Some dreams are calls to action. The hardest part is knowing which is which.
P.S. If you know where I can find 20 slices of swiss cheese roughly the same size, please let me know. ;)
2 comments:
Money is only a tool, which can be used for good or ill. That is money, no matter the quantity, is completely amoral. Only humans have the capacity to make moral decisions; to follow God or not.
The problem, of course, is failing to acknowledge the blessings God grants us and being obedient to Him and not our own desires. It is the latter course of action, caused by our own will, which leads to problems.
As for having money, if I do, I ask what God wants me to do with it. I'm not--most, most definitely--a prosperity gospel person who believes that God wants me to be rich. Nonetheless, God works through us, and as much as you may not like it, it does cost to do things that God wants. The money to send you to Kenya, which undoubtedly blessed you and those Kenyans you met, was only possible because the money came from God through someone, whether you or one or more benefactors. Alas, its been that way since Adam's sin brought the necessity of toil upon us, his descendants.
Cheers.
The other thing, of course, is that everything we have is God's, and we're just stewards of it. Too often we're poor stewards of it, but as we grow in faith we hopefully become better stewards of what he's given us. So...perhaps God is going to place you in a position where He will ask you to steward MORE resources, and ask you to manage it even more wisely...
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