Not Quite Finished

A very interesting aspect of almost everyone’s life. I say almost because there are still pockets of cultures that still deal heavily in the barter system, which is something that I have observed and really enjoyed. I think the bartering system brings communities into a closer knit with each other, as you learn to appreciate the unique skills of your fellow men and women. Cash has kind of taken that away from us now – not to mention the cashless society that the world is quickly taking in. I’ll talk a bit more on that segment a little later.

My wife and I spent the past couple of years in a culture that rarely used credit cards, debit cards, or any other form of cash-less-ness. It was quite a change from the previous ten years where everywhere we went, from restaurants to hotels to planes, nothing but cards were used. In almost every restaurant, except for the small, hole-in-the-wall eateries, upon finishing your meal, a waiter or waitress would appear with a tiny handheld machine that you slipped your card of choice into and instantly paid your bill. You didn’t even have to get up from your seat. I must say, while there are certainly benefits to using the cards, I still prefer the cold, hard cash going from my hand to the person being paid. The benefit to cash is that I don’t have people and machines all over the world tracking my every purchase, and thereby infecting my online devices with more advertisements than I can cope with.

As I was growing up my parents, and especially my father, instilled in me and my siblings, a respect and high regard for getting out on our own and earning what we wanted or needed. I would be hard pressed to recall any time when I went to my dad to ask for money to pay for an activity, or outing, or a baseball/football/basketball game, where he actually gave some to me. It was either, “use your allowance”, or “go out and earn it”, as the reply. Buying clothes was a whole other matter. My parents, usually my mother, would take me to a department store just prior to school starting and buy me (and my siblings) the essentials we needed. We had little choice in what was purchased. I was often embarrassed by what had been bought for me, especially when I was in my first couple of years of high school. Christmas was the other time of year for clothes, and there was certainly no choice there. Thankfully my mom worked in a modern law firm and she was used to seeing the latest clothing styles of the young attorneys and got better at her clothes selection over the years. Dad still lived in the 30s depression era. He thought I should wear pants as baggy as his were.

As challenging as that was, it taught me some valuable life lessons. I remember all the different ways I earned money growing up – collecting old newspapers and magazines and taking them to the local dump where I got that “cash in hand”, repairing bicycles for neighborhood kids, my paper route, selling Christmas wreaths for the Boy Scouts to go on a camping trip, collecting soda bottles that people threw out and collecting 2 cents for each one, raking leaves and shoveling snow for every neighbor I could, and any other avenue to earn some cash that I could think of. 

One of the lessons I learned was to be a skinflint. I have never been very frivolous with my spending. Our children can attest to that. To this day, I don’t think we have ever purchased a computer for our daughter – she just gets all of our hand-me-downs. This past Christmas we finally bit the bullet and purchased her a new iPad. She’ll probably have it for the next ten years. Our son has had the same computer he bought and put together himself at least a decade ago. (More like 15 years ago) He keeps it updated with new parts but it’s basically the same guts as when he bought it. And my wonderful wife is just about as stingy as I am. While she grew up in slightly better circumstances that I did, her parents were very frugal as well.

So, over the years God has blessed us with using His bounty entrusted to us, for some sweet blessings. We have traveled to over 50 countries and been able to witness and live in, multiple cultures. But the really special blessings are how we have been able to help others. Sending worker’s kids to school, providing funds for crops to be planted, saving lives through medical donations to dear friends who could not afford such care, providing plane tickets for refugees to flee a country they were entrapped in, purchasing motorcycles for young men to provide for their families, providing funding for transport to and from seminary teaching of students for a professor, and other such opportunities that God put into our paths. We get immense joy out of such occasions. We are now in a process of giving even more through a channel we learned about since being in the States. 

Reflecting back to those early childhood days, that I really didn’t enjoy and always wondered why my dad was being so hard and mean to me, I guess I’m now reaping the benefits of God’s wisdom, through my parents. I now have the joy and privilege to give so much away that will benefit others on this planet that have not been as blessed as us. Praise God, to whom it all belongs.