To Prosper Or To Not

When I was a kid and even to some extent as an adult, I was more than a little afraid of never having more than "just enough to get by." I have met other people who think that having no more than "just enough to get by" is a great thing, and that it is selfish and greedy to want more than that.

So it forcibly struck me when I read, a few years ago, the statement that wanting "just enough to get by" is a selfish attitude, in that it does not consider the needs of anyone else. It is "me" oriented. Frankly, if you don’t have more than just enough for yourself, how do you propose to ever help anyone else?

Selah. (Pause and think about that.)

I’d like to consider two couples with whom I’ve been acquainted. These two couples are roughly the same age; they each have one son and one daughter; both men have engineering-type minds; both women are excellent career homemakers. Both couples started out with almost no earthly goods, and both couples love the Lord.

That’s where the similarities end and the differences begin. The first couple bought into the belief that prosperity is bad. The husband studiously avoided high-paying jobs and commitments and promotion; they carefully avoided owning their own home and accumulating any sort of wealth. They steered toward manual labor, which, frankly, was miles beneath their gifting: he was brilliantly creative with mechanical things, and she was an excellent manager.

They did do some volunteer work for a mission training center, but what they were able to contribute was nothing more than their time, because they had nothing more to contribute. As far as I know, they still, at roughly sixty years of age, live in a rented house and work a low-paying job and practice every economy. I don’t think they ever planned to retire, but it’s frankly a good thing, because it doesn’t seem likely they’d have the funds to survive retirement.

The other couple? Wow. I could probably leave it right there. They are a few years older than the first couple, and they’ll never retire, either. The Bible doesn’t talk about retirement, he says, and aside from that, they can give a lot more when he’s working. (And my own opinion is that he’d shrivel up and die in about a week if he had nothing challenging and constructive to do.)

They own two homes, one of which has got to be valued at over a million dollars. He is on the boards of an international charity; the engineering college of a state university; and some agricultural advisory board that discusses how to produce enough food to feed the world. And those are just the boards I know about. Her pet charity is a children’s home, but they have a family foundation that gives money into just about every good cause that exists.

Tell me, what do you think? Better to prosper? Or better to not?

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