Deep Dive

I have a secret. At the start of 2023, I revealed “enchantment” as my word of the year. What I didn’t tell you is that God whispered a second word in my ear, but I swatted at it like a pesky gnat because I didn’t know what to do with it.

As someone who doesn’t have any debt and lives on a zero-based budget, I felt as though I have been nothing but a good steward of the resources God has blessed our family with. I’ve checked all the boxes, and my report card testifies that I aced the exam.

So why would he give me the word “stewardship”? I was standing at the edge of a pool, staring at the bottom, hearing that he wanted to take me deeper, but there’s nowhere else to go when you’ve hit concrete.

I threw the word in a pot on the back burner of my brain, thinking that it would eventually simmer its way completely to steam so that I could simply place the empty pot back under the kitchen counter. But, as I read across Scripture and various books over the months that followed, God seemed to keep pouring even more water in the stewardship pot. I couldn’t ignore it.

So it simmered on for fifteen months with no recipe of what I was to make of it. Fifteen. Months. Yet, the water never boiled off. He was calling me to keep the pot out with the heat on.

Until Gucci on a laptop gifted me with a paradigm shift.

It was a typical school day, one in which my students were testing. I always sit behind them so I can monitor what they are doing on their computers. One of my students, a sweet, outgoing girl finished her test, then downsized her web browser, leaving her computer background staring at me. Golden “Gucci” letters swimming in a sea of pink.

When I saw it, it lit my brain on fire as if all this time God had been sprinkling my gray matter with gasoline of the Scriptures. Gucci just happened to be the friction I needed for my match. I started glancing around the room, each emblem on every backpack, shoe, and water bottle successively adding fuel to the fire. And then my eyes settled on a pair of Birkenstocks with socks.

Rewind 28 years, and I was wearing Birkenstocks when I was a high school student. However, you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing socks with them, because that defeated the purpose of a sandal.

Fast forward to 2 years ago, and you would be hard pressed to find any high school student at my school sporting a pair of Birkenstocks. Vans, Converse, and Crocs completely ruled the fashion roost. But then this year, a phenomenon occurred. All of a sudden, Birkenstocks showed up on campus en masse accompanied with socks. They were all over the place. And that’s when I started to think about the why. Birkenstocks have, quite literally, been around for centuries, so students who have recently taken an interest in them are not doing so because it’s a brand new item that everyone is hyped up about. Someone or something had somehow communicated to the masses that the “in” thing right now is to wear Birkenstocks and wear them with socks. In fact, if you don’t wear them with socks, you’ll be ridiculed in the same way my seventeen year old self would have ridiculed someone who wore them with socks. Some fashion influencer had said “jump,” and we responded by saying, “how high?”

What God was revealing to me actually had nothing to do with Birkenstocks or Gucci. They were just the catalyst to get me to peel back a layer of something I thought I had already mastered. The only question I’ve ever asked when it comes to financial stewardship is “how?” How do I spend my money? And the answer to that is explicitly stated on a perfectly curated spreadsheet. I have a place for everything and everything is in its place. I give, I save, I spend. I stay within the lines, always the responsible pupil.

Yet the teacher had a new lesson for me: stewardship isn’t just about the “how” I spend my money. True stewardship focuses on the “why.” Good stewardship isn’t just about not spending beyond our means. It’s also about pulling back the curtain and catching a glimpse of the wizard of our own making.  It’s about examining our motivations. Why am I buying this? This whole time I had been gauging how well I was stewarding by looking at the blood coursing through my veins, when what I really needed to dissect was how the heart was pumping. If I really questioned my motivations behind what I buy, knowing that how I spend my money points directly to what I love, my spending would be much more intentional, and I would probably spend less. Which means I would have more. More to give to those in need, more to save for things that really matter.

Birkenstocks aren’t evil. I still own a pair of classic sandals that I wear throughout the summer. After all, it is a quality item that lasts for years and years. And to be honest, I would probably spend less buying a new pair I wear for ten years than having to replace cheaply made, and oftentimes unethically sourced sandals from a big box store. The only role these brands played for me that day in the classroom was they caused me to ask the why. 

These questions just scratch the surface of what we can ask ourselves about our motivations. And by the way, our spending motivations aren’t limited to just fashion. We should complete a heart check behind anything we consume. I’m ready to separate the wheat from the chaff. To spend in a way that really matters, not just spend money because I have it.

So when I came back to the pool and stared at the bottom. I saw that there was a deeper. It was the ground beneath the pool. The sand and soil. The foundation that supported the body of water. We can’t see it with our eyes, and we rarely ever think about it, if it all. In the same way, I can see how I spend my money when I look at my budget. But it requires me to delve into the unseen to ask “why” before I hand over that twenty dollar bill.

If we don’t recognize and fix our faulty motivations, the sand will shift and compromise the foundation of the pool. And before we know it, unnoticeable cracks will appear and our resources will begin to slowly drain, leaving us with less and less. Instead, we should build our finances on a firm foundation. One that is not only monetarily responsible, but one that also has a healthy heart behind it.