As I’ve been saying on my posts about the illusion of permanent financial security and the literary pictures of our relationship with wealth, this whole realm is a complex negotiation. The scales move depending on the specific variables involved–and those can be anything from “I want to be a school teacher” to “my aunt made off with my inheritance”. The financial decisions we all face are incredibly complex (and will be). The wide range of timing and variables mean that WISDOM may look very different in various circumstance–and certainly so from person to person. I do hope that the Spirit of Wisdom would guide us in such a way that no matter which Abraham’s Wallet reader was placed into a situation with certain specific circumstances, we would all act in identical ways based on what we all learn/share about money. For today’s lesson, let’s look at one particular variable: automobiles.
Cars are a great example because the choice of what to drive (to own? to lease? to rent on a per need basis? or forego the whole category in favor of public transit?) is circumstantially derived. Living in Brooklyn as an undergrad will mean one thing, while living in Houston, Texas as a father of 5 with a corporate job will mean quite another. Number of miles required, financing terms, cash on hand, and commute time to the 9 to 5, or what to take when you pick up clients on the way to the Country Club will all require different considerations. One decision isn’t more “godly” than the next (this is a very important point!), but Wisdom should help us all navigate the question.
Personally, I would much prefer to NOT own a car. I count it as a depreciating asset that does nothing but cost me money each month. They have never been a status symbol for me. In my single days, I drove a 1990 Volvo station wagon without A/C. I had driven it in high school and college and I found it utilitarian and (generally) reliable for transporting me and cargo. That’s it. This was not godly of me; it’s just the way I saw cars. Efficiency and practicality were king.
Now, I would’ve had to reconsider that daily driver Volvo, for example, if I was picking up executives in Austin every other weekend to court as business clients. The charm would drip away in sweat patterns in the Texas heat. No, I guess I would need something more like a sports car/roadster, perhaps–you know, like Gatsby drove. I would be trying to signal professionalism, competence, and a sense of worldliness that the 1990 Volvo just couldn’t pull off. This is neither godless nor immoral; it’s business. I get it.
Then I got married. Then we had kids. At this time we were, as has been discussed, millionaires. We drove a late model, gigantic foreign SUV with all the folding seats and digital entertainment module and the whole shebang. When we drove up, we signaled “we can afford a big nice automobile”. And we could. AND THAT WAS NOT UNGODLY. We could afford it (we were then, as always, generous givers and don’t idolize money, in case that’s salient to you), and we drove the ever living snot out of that thing. It was a good car. Thank you Toyota.
Let me confess: I have always been a bit of a car snob. For instance, I will always pick German/Swedish (or in the case of the Toyota, Japanese) engineered vehicles because of superior design, on principle, as an insufferable idealist charmed by precision, durability, and clean lines. When I was a millionaire, that was possible and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would buy anything less.
But then we hit the bottom.
When it was time for bicycles and pizza, as you may recall, we could no longer afford the giant late model Toyota SUV (not even just the repairs). We decided that a 1999 GMC suburban that drove like CRAP fit our matrix of needs: big, cheap to repair, and it cost less than 3K when we had less than 3K for a car! It was the PERFECT car for us at that moment and I hated it. Deeply. I felt so pitifully, humiliatingly American – like I should be eating ding-dongs and Dr. Pepper and listening to Garth Brooks wherever I drove it. And that is not my style or preference. That said, the old ‘burban got us to California twice, Utah, North Carolina once, and Colorado twice before I sold it for what I paid for it. It was humbling and perfect, and I thank God for that GMC provision. My family looked like vagabonds tooling around the American Southwest – much like Steinbeck’s Joad family, now that I think about it – but we were provided for and we made out just fine.
The wisdom of operating on a budget (no matter what you earn), and parlaying that discipline into long-term wealth, is the through line of Abraham’s Wallet. And that’s how I aim to live. So, when financial troubles hit, we re-calibrated our world: I was able to sell off our big, fancy, foreign SUV and operate in a “damage control /strategic retreat” to endure the storm. If I had ever thought it “ungodly” to have an expensive car on principal, I wouldn’t have had an asset I could cash out when the difficult moment arose. Neither state was any godlier than the next, and both “having much” and “having little” can be forms of blessing, if they’re lived in submission to God.
In summary, Wisdom is less about a principled code of unyielding maxims (that kind of thinking might be termed “the law”), but more about discerning…
a) what season your family is in (including, “What’s coming up?”)
b) the best way to meet specific, immediate needs, and
c) making the best researched decision (with the counsel of other voices) at the time when you have to make a call.
I’ve used the automotive category as my example, but this kind of in-season decision-making applies to all sorts of categories:
- Schooling (homeschool, public, private, hybrid, college-prep, unschooling, nature-based schooling, etc… the options are dizzying. Who doesn’t need wisdom here?!)
- Various kinds of insurance (term/whole, umbrella policies, disability, etc.)
- Healthcare (great if it is included in benefits, but what if it isn’t? There are tons of options out there… which does your family need?)
So you see, Wisdom, and the lessons that set us up to attend to it, is necessary in virtually all areas of life. And as your family’s leader, nobody needs it more than you. It’s interesting to note, by the way, that there are only a dozen times where we have a recorded “word from God” in the account of Abraham’s life in Genesis. The rest of the time he was having to make calculations and forecast good/better/best outcomes. He relied upon Wisdom and gut discernment when he made deals/decisions. It was true when he was a homeless nomad, it was true when he had an established household and people began to talk of him as though he were royalty, and it was true when, finally, Big Daddy Abe was a patriarch in the fullest sense of the word.
You will NEVER NOT need Wisdom.
You know that old 1990 Volvo station wagon without the A/C? I still drive it. It kinda feels nostalgic to me, now, every day I climb in. We’ve been through some stuff. I still listen to my cassettes from high school in it. My son begins drivers education in a few months, so the old gray girl will be put through her paces once again even though she’s hit 300K miles. Kinda sweet, in a way. But not much more than that–it’s just a car.
