This is my life--simple and sweet in many ways, but in the end, poor. It's different than what I've always know. What I've known and breathed was frugality--poorness by choice. Knowing you have money away in the bank, but choosing not to spend it, it's a different thing. Knowing your husband isn't working full-time anymore, but going to school, scouring textbooks, and your paychecks are small and the money in the bank is all there is, it's a scary thing.
I think many of us are under a false impression that once we graduate from college, we'll be set. We'll get a job with our degree and settle in and make money and pay off our car and go to restaurants and plays and support our church and save for rainy days. Then we get an entry level job, or get married and go back to school, or face mounds of debt and we find ourselves discouraged. Maybe it's not that we think money is all there is, just that we thought there would be a bit more of it. I find myself remembering high school days when my after-school job paid for movie tickets; today we buy a Groupon deal and save it for six months, waiting for a movie really worth going to see. I remember buying make-up and jewelry just for fun; now I look at the two pair of earrings I wear on a regular basis and kind of wish I had remembered to ask for some for my birthday. I don't feel like I need a lot of stuff, I just hate feeling restricted. And when I ache under those ties, I find myself feeling discontent, slowly allowing myself to be taken into a bondage of covetousness and idolatry.
Right now, I don't know how I'm going to get through the next four years of seminary living, and the years of kids and ministry after that. But this is what I do know:
I am united to Christ. I am quite literally, one with him. And if that is true, what I do have to worry about? Hudson Taylor wrote to his sister, "Oh, my dear Sister, it is a wonderful thing to be really one
with a risen and exalted Saviour, to be a member of Christ! Think what it
involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be
rich and your left poor, or your head be well fed while your body
starves?"
I will not be left alone. I will not go without. I will be cared for. As long as I am one with Christ, I have nothing to fear, no anxiety that is really legitimate. I am the body of Christ and my Savior will care for me in whatever way he sees fit. He was himself abandoned so I do not ever have to be.
I have endless things to be thankful for. The more time I focus on what I can't have (which these days, seems to be quite a lot), the more I miss the small gifts of grace given to me each day. If only in the hum of my washing machine, the musty autumn breeze on my neck, the mud in my hands and under my fingernails, God is gifting me with more than I deserve. He sings his love song to me and twines my life with grace-gifts that I only need to receive. He says to me, "See, see, you are the one my soul loves. I am here. I am with you. I am caring for you. I am loving you."
It is a sweet thing to thank him. It is bitter to begrudge him what I do not have.
Poverty is part of my identity. I found myself thinking the other night in the car as I drove a long drive home about Psalm 40, which ends: "As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me." I was surprised to remember that my condition is not "poor for a time" but "poor for all time." I am poor and needy. I have nothing to bring before my Savior. I have nothing to offer. I deserve nothing. I need everything. I am dependent on my Lord for salvation and life. Each day I breathe because breath is given to me. Each day I am saved because Jesus has claimed me. I cannot hope to ever be anything but humble, yet the Lord takes thought for me. How can I truly think I want for anything, when the riches of Christ have been given to me? And how can I think I deserve to live better, when my very soul is poor? I can only pray that God will give me humility to see myself for what I am and live in thankfulness that in spite of this, he has named me and made me his own.
