My world @ work, Episode I

I hope to do these fairly often, and make kind of a super-cool series out of them...

Today's episode:

I opened a campus mail envelope with my name on it today. That makes me feel good. Important. Don't remind me of the fact that there are at least seven other people with my exact job title in this department, or that there are even more in another part of the department who could easily move into my position were I to leave - just let me enjoy my moment in the spotlight. With the manila envelope. And the smell of permanent marker. Ahhhhh - this is what it feels like to live it, huh? The American Dream.

It's just money, right?

I think about debt a lot in the wake of the Great Disaster of 1998-2002 (better known as my college career and graduation), much in the same way someone thinks about the annoying type of tagalong neighborhood kid who seems to have nothing better to do than hang around you constantly. Of course, they're not the same, and of course, I am totally, 49% joking about it all.

Quick history: I got a liberal arts degree, then I began pouting about it because of the steep debt it left me in with little usefulness for obtaining a money-job to help pay it off.

So I think about it, maybe a lot, I don't know. But I wonder often - how do I get out of debt? Because I believe in the value of not being in debt, and Kathryn and I have made good efforts to be better about our money. Certainly, we could be more consistently disciplined, but even at the times that we have been such, we seem to make little headway, often because one of our clunkers (check here and here to see the makers of these fine automobiles) blows another gasket or tire or water pump, or whatnot.

What keeps me in debt? Perhaps it's the same thing that got me there - that at some point, I believed the world when it told me, "You need this car. You need this degree. You need this triply-stacked cheeseburger or ice-cream cone. You need to see this movie or everyone will think you're still living in the nineties."

How do I get out of debt? I don't want to discount the value of budgeting, but I don't think that's going to be enough to get me out of financial slavery and into financial freedom - because it's not just monetary. There must be a spirituality to it too.

That's what hit me in the head and said, "Blog." The realization that freedom is born out of sacrifice. Blood pays a debt. The way to be free from something is to die to it. Accepting freedom in Christ, including freedom from debt, means that I accept his bloody death as payment for my debt. And God calls me to participate in that death. I participate by dying to the things that enslave me. I cease to believe the voice of culture telling me what I have to have. Maybe once I have died to my never-satisfied appetite for these cultural products, I'll find that my checkbook will have balanced as well. What's a little money to the God who gave his Son?