-Money Blog Part 1: Currency vs. Character-

Even if you don't believe anything else the Bible says one thing that is hard to argue with is 1st Timothy 6:10 which tells us, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil..." Take it from someone who worked in bank branches in Orange County, CA (a region where you can find one of the most concentrated groupings of wealth on the planet), for almost a decade. Loving money can cause problems. I once listened to a brother and sister argue in front of me for 20 minutes about who should get the extra 1 CENT from their recently deceased mother's savings account because it wouldn't split evenly into 2 parts. There's something wrong there. Something terribly, terribly wrong.

I think one of the biggest problems happens when we assign value to money. If you're thinking, "What are you talking about John? Money already has a value. We don't assign it one," that's not at all what I mean. What I mean is the value we allow our money to give us. I'll explain. Often times in our culture, we equate someone's value as a person with their affluence. The car they drive, the area of town their house is in, the places they eat, the clothing they wear. These are all ways in which we gage someone's wealth and, in turn, gage their value. That is a problem in it's own right but it leads to an even bigger problem. Comparison.

We begin to compare what we have with what others have. Is my car as nice as theirs? My clothes? My home? But comparisons like these are actually a double-edged sword. We can't win. If someone else's "stuff" is better than ours then we feel inferior. It their "stuff" isn't seemingly as nice we feel superior to them. either way we are basing not only their value as a human on their money, but also OUR value. Then it becomes about being "as good as" someone else. So rather than basing our value on what we ARE, we base it on what we HAVE. When this happens, money becomes more than just currency, it becomes our character.

We, as individuals, must make conscious decisions to end this mentality. We must stop confusing our self-worth with our net-worth. Until we do, we won't have our money, it will have us. We must remember that money and "stuff" is not the goal itself but simply a tool we can use to help us achieve our goals. Because when our goals in life revolve around the accumulation of cash and "stuff" then in the end, we have done nothing with significance. We have simply hoarded and taken and allowed our currency to be more important that our character.