This spring, I went to a professional hockey game with my oldest son and my husband. Talk about a fish out of water: I am the mid-30s mother with my hands over my ears, blocking the pounding music while my nine year old is breaking down orange-justice style in the aisle beside me. I’m crossing my fingers that the roaming spotlight doesn’t spark a migraine, or worse, that the kissing cam zooms in without warning on my get-me-out-of-here face. “I don’t know how much more I can take,” I mouth to my husband over the boomboomboom. He flashes a grin.
“Just try to enjoy yourself!”
What brings us to the hockey game? Business, I’ll say. Quite often the vendors who sell product through my husband’s wholesale work like to reward employees with a slap on the back. Usually it’s breakfast burritos, sub sandwiches, lunch for all the guys. They show up with trinkets and goodies and giveaways. Yeti cooler? Check. There is golf, and of course dinners out. Around Christmastime, stacks of Harry and David boxes arrive at work. Huge tins of popcorn, whiskey, chocolate covered almonds (my favorite). Gift cards to restaurants, whole serving trays of cookies. I’ve ridden a ski train to mountain sponsored by vendors. It boasted an open bar and individual goodie bags stuffed with beanies and scarves. We had the day of our lives, blazing up and down trails on snow machines, then back home on the train with hot toddies and stories all around. Tonight it was hockey, and there just happened to be a few extra tickets, which is why we are here with dad. We are sitting directly behind the goal, up several rows, but in a nice enough section to have our own server. His name is Chad, and he hands us a menu. I order nachos and a coke instead of a beer because I can’t trust the concrete arena steps after any amount of alcohol. My boy, hesitant, asks for cotton candy. “Mom, it’s eight-fifty,” he whispers with concern. “I only have four dollars in my pocket. Mom, look. A bottle of water is four-fifty! I can’t even buy that!” His eyes fill with panic.
“Don’t worry,” I pat his knee to assure him. “Dad has started a tab for his work guys. You can order whatever you want and we’ll take care of it. Save your money for another time.”
He gets the cotton candy.
This is my life, and I cannot even believe it, that I’m telling my son to order whatever he wants rather than hiding the menu and explaining what price gouging means. It is a far cry from my childhood, still not understood in his own nine year old brain, but within our family’s means. Is it wrong to buy cotton candy at nine bucks a pop? I’m sure it is–it’s not even the fresh kind. Is it okay to blow money like nobody’s watching? Well, a certain nine year old is watching.
It is indeed another rich man dilemma, and I’m still thinking it out.
I didn’t grow up with money. When I was a young child, we lived in a house without heat. A ladder leaned up against the stairwell where the steps had been torn out. Rebar poked up through gravel in the living room. The dusty horsehair plaster walls were exposed–another fixer project my dad had on his to-do list. He had framed in a new bathroom, but it didn’t have running water or lights. We took turns taking baths, and every few minutes he’d enter the shadowy room to add a new bucket of warm water to the tub. I’d fall into bed shivering and cold, my hair still wet from bathing.
I was jealous of friends at school with puffy jackets–not because I cared about the Rams or any professional football team–but because the stylish jackets looked warm, and I most definitely was not. Needing and wanting made me feel doubly ashamed. How could I betray my parents by asking for what they couldn’t give? How could I ever be normal?
I learned a way of coping with this. I told myself (quite subconsciously) that I didn’t care. “Toughen up,” my dad liked to say, and I did. I read books to escape. I made myself small and grew a shell where nothing could hurt me, not the teasing at school, not the cold at home. I buttoned my mouth and pretended I was made of iron. I didn’t realize it was hardening my attitude into a peculiar disdain for everyone who couldn’t suck it up like me.
There is a level of pride that coexists with poverty. I realized early on I could acquire other personas to cover up. I could be the little girl who collected hats and owned her own lemonade stand. I could be perfectly obedient and well-behaved. No one would ever have to know: I could secretly justify harbored bitterness toward everyone because compared to them, my problems were always worse. For whatever reason, they were the lucky ones, and if they feigned discomfort, I had zero compassion. I was naturally suspicious of people with money, but still incredibly jealous.
Funny enough, as unfamiliar as I was with wealth, personally, I have to say: it easy to warm up to. As a young girl, I could obviously see the advantage to having money. It is like looking at a chocolate bar from a distance; it’s desirable, delicious, and I knew exactly what I would do with it if I could access it. But once it landed in my hands, once I took a bite, ate the whole bar, found myself satiated–once the chocolate kept coming, all I could do was let it melt in my hands. All it did was leave me sticky and uncomfortable. It gave me the same sort of chest pains I had as a jealous, hateful child. How many Harry and David towers could be unstacked and unwrapped by my own ungrateful children, leaving wrappers scattered all over the floor? Why was it so much work to maintain the facade of having it all together? How could we ever feel happy if we were always spoiling ourselves?
All I wanted was to wash it off, rid myself of the mess.
Contentment–could I ever find it? Did it live in a warm house the suburbs? Could it be bought with a bachelor’s degree or by finding my true soul mate? All you can eat at the hockey game?
The writer of Hebrews urged his readers: Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
“Never will I leave you;
Never will I forsake you.”
Hebrews 13:5
It requires practice and diligence to keep one’s life “free from the love of money”. Maybe it takes more awareness if you’re a rich man, but even if you live in a shack with no heat it is hard to not wish for enough money to raise the thermostat. Somehow, some way, my parents unwittingly shielded us from it. Of course it is muddled by memory, but truly, they set almost a spotless example of being free from the love of money. What kept us unaffected for so long was one thing–we had each other. We had no money, but I never felt insecure.
Holidays spent with my family growing up are my most precious examples of this. We kids knew better than to ask or beg for the newest thing (skip-its? TrapperKeepers?), yet Christmas and birthdays were loaded with treasure. There was music and joy and the promise of safety, warmth. My mom was brilliant when it came to creating an amazing holiday from very little. She sewed us homemade gifts from fabric scraps. One year she discovered the thrifty art of blowing up photographs to poster-size. She made entire feasts from seemingly nothing, and we felt–we knew she did it completely for us. She wrapped every present and held them out, giggling, her hands pressed to her face with nervous excitement. One year, maybe for his birthday, my brother unwrapped a gallon of Ranch dressing. It was a typical, hilarious gift from Mom. This is why we adored her. She cleared out a place in the fridge for it to make its home (not a small sacrifice, if you know her fridge). This, we convinced ourselves, was worth a thousand TrapperKeepers.
There is a funny verse in the Bible, one that we like to quote often when we have a deadline, goal, etc.. It’s the one we print on posterboard for the highschool championship football game, mark in permanent marker on our inner wrist when we run a 5k. When we face the inner battle to not eat a second piece of chocolate cake after we’ve already had one. “I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” (Phi. 4:13 NLT)
We usually skip right past the verses before, because it seems so unnecessarily contingent:
I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”
Philippians 4:11-12
The confounding thing here is that Paul observes at both poverty and wealth as a curse! Who of us in America takes this view–that the pursuit of money is actually a path to ruin? We all despise a trailer park mentality, but do we equally pity the affluent? Hear me out–both are to be endured, both are possible breeding ground for contentment. The only way to survive not having enough or having plenty is by relying on God’s strength to help us hold on–to Him, and nothing else.
Happiness cannot be bought, begged, or borrowed. Contentment–the act of living satisfied–can happen anywhere, but it’s as seldom found as a needle in a haystack. It might be found in the slums, it might be found in a gated community. It is most likely found in the most ordinary of ordinaries, the enough-to-cover-the-bills life. But it cannot be found apart from Christ.
I thank God I grew up in the home I did. If I hadn’t experienced His presence in need, I surely couldn’t have recognized contentment in wealth. At this point in my life, I finally understand what Paul is talking about. The little girl who coveted her classmate’s puffy coat grew into a woman who realized life wasn’t actually any better when she had her pick of store bought, down-filled jackets. It’s nice to be warm–this is what matters. Back when a gallon of Ranch dressing was cause for celebration, I didn’t know there were families who went on Christmas break ski trips. My parents probably knew, but they never pointed it out. I’m grateful for their wisdom: contentment is a far higher road than comparison. If anything lured me out of my hardness and into this better perspective, it was my parents’ visible pursuit of Jesus. Not comfort, which they saw as a trap, but the forever promise we would never be forsaken.
Give me neither poverty nor riches;
Feed me with the food that is my portion.
Lest I be full and deny you and say,
“Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.
Proverbs 30:8-9
