When Money is Tight it’s All About “We”

This Christmas, the Miller family will have less financial-driven stress than we’ve had in recent memory. That’s right less financial stress. That’s because we had our own personal recession four years ago. We’ve (I’ve) learned a lot and know what it takes to get by on less. But first a little background…

Four years ago I lost my job as a pastor and my income fell to 40% of what I had been making. It had been way too long since I had left my Fortune 100 job. Skill sets for the new marketplace had changed, so I worked as many as three jobs at a time to  keep income coming in.

There were plenty of times when we had to go to Kroger to exchange coins to get a few dollars for gas because there was less than $10 in the checking account…with three days left until payday. This gave us a whole new insight to disposable income. A big part of the problem is that we had incurred an unhealthy amount of unsecured debt. The personal lending bubble burst for us before we even knew who Bernie Madoff was or thought the U.S. government would have to bail out General Motors.

I normally hate lists, but I’m communicating information here. It’s your job to do the transformation. So here goes. Here’s some lessons we learned that may help you.

- We. Not me. Not her. Not them. We. Ken and Michelle. A unit. A team. A couple.

We.          Us.         We.       One.

- We learned to communicate more efficiently. We learned to fight fair. You’re going to fight as a couple. For those with self-righteous leanings, I’m sure that you guys dialogue vigorously or something retarded like that. We fought about money. But we learned to fight fairly. OK, we got better at it. We’re still honing our skills at communicating information rather than emotion. Why? When money is tight, you wanna fight. To fight fairly, you can read this post for better technique.

- We learned to communicate often. We talked constantly about our situation. If you don’t have much money, you better know who’s spending what, when they’re going to spend it, and when more money is coming in. Since communicating often about money is hard for us humans to do, this one will take the most effort. It’s just plain uncomfortable to talk about money when there’s seems to be no money to talk about.

- We learned humility. We had stellar credit. Had. It’s rebounded dramatically in the last 18 months, but it tanked because some of our debtors were more important than others. We learned our self-worth wasn’t tied up in our FICO score.

- We learned to tweak our personal financial systems. We averted financial “disaster” because we had a good personal financial system in place. We had and still have a budget, but we went from a budget that was updated every couple of months to a budget that was updated every few days. We issued purchase orders. Yep, verbal purchase orders for anything over a predetermined amount. We spent our money together. We also used more cash and less debit card. Dave Ramsey is no fool.

- We learned that kind and generous people actually exist in the local church. It’s not exactly a financial lesson but it may be even more important. Pain and suffering is best experienced in a community of faith.

Anybody want to weigh in and let everyone else know what you do to get by when money is tight?

Marriage stats that will blow your mind

One of the most interesting sites on the Internet there is to survey the popular view of American culture is at SoulPancake.com.  I

follow the site on  Twitter as well as Rainn Wilson, one of the site’s editors and Dwight on “the Office.”  It’s not a mainstream Christian site, so if you visit it and start asking me why I frequent the site I won’t respond to you.  It’s designed for dialogue, not for Christian devotion.  Anyway…

SoulPancake.com asked the question, “WHEN DID MARRIAGE BECOME AN OUTDATED CONCEPT?”  I personally thought it was a great question to ask.  I’m pretty interested in the whole marriage thing anyway.  So I put my two cents in.  I did so with the help of a really great document that’s chuck full of great statistics.  One of the stats that absolutely blew me away was how cohabitation has become a norm in American culture.

Major props go out to The Association of Marriage & Family Ministries.  They twittered the doc so I’m guessing they wanted to make it public.  I have an email into them asking permission in order to be ethical and all.  I’m taking the liberty of posting it for your viewing pleasure/displeasure.  You can download it here.

Sex to die for

Preface
I get asked to speak to college students/young adults once in a while. Last week I was invited to a college group to do a talk on pre-marital sex. Not how to have it, how to respond to the inevitable urges we have as human beings and how manage those urges from a Christian worldview. Like I told them last week, if you take nothing else away from the talk/article you need to take away the “one big question.”

If you’re a parent, use the info below to talk about sex with your child. It’s too bad that it’s something most parents leave to self-discovery. In the words of Crosby, Stills, and Nash…”teach your children well.”

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Sex to die for

If you grew up in the Southern religious culture that I grew up in, sex as a subject was treated more as a sin than as a gift from God that a husband and wife share. The word “sex” was never even mentioned by any pastor that I ever heard preach. Okay, my Dad (a pastor) did talk to me about sex but it was pretty much “don’t you ever get a girl pregnant.”

So I grew up thinking abstinence was the best way to handle pre-marital sex. Mainly because I thought my Dad would kill me if I did anything otherwise.

Southern religious culture, and I’m guessing most other Protestant and Catholic religious cultures, talk about sex from a sexual immorality point of view as their default setting. We pound out the virtue of abstinence with a sledge hammer of “don’ts” and “thus saith the Lord.” Okay, fine. It’s a sin to have pre-marital sex. The problem is, when you mix humans and religion, one tends to get a legalistic view of things when the subject is charged with social tension.

When God says something is a sin, I usually think that there’s got to be a good reason that he’s giving us a warning. He’s infinitely smarter than we are, right? So why not look at his command that tells us not to go there, to not have pre-marital sex? Let’s do…

If you’re not religious or a Christ-follower and you’re reading this, humor me for a bit and keep reading.

Humans were created in the image of God. There’s a lot to unpack there. Suffice it to say that we were created to be spiritual beings with a physical existence. Then God says to have sex. When God told us to “be fruitful and multiply” he didn’t mean eat healthy and score high on the math section of the SAT. To make more humans, there had to be sex. So God created human beings to have sex. In the perfect setting of the Garden of Eden, God saw that everything was good. (You can read the whole story in Genesis 1.)

Humans damaged our relationship with God by being prideful. That, in turn, damaged our spiritual connection (Gen. 3:1,7,23) with God and our emotional (Gen. 3:15) and physical existence (Gen. 3:16-17).

When God introduced himself in human form, we were given the opportunity to be healed spiritually, to enjoy more emotional health, and to understand and live with our physical maladies. (This is a long post so to find out how Jesus Christ came to make your life better by reading this book and this book for starters.)

Since human beings were created to be with both God and other humans, we crave being connected. When we’re missing a healthy spiritual and/or emotional connection we try to connect the only other way we know how…a physical connection. We often try to fill the spiritual/emotional need by connecting physically, often with sex. The results end up being an epic failure. It’s a crappy part of life in a world damaged by pride and selfishness.

When pre-marital sex happens, affairs happen, babies happen, abortions happen, divorces happen, STDs happen, and lack of trust between humans happens. Small wonder that God says that sex before marriage is unhealthy and dehumanizing.

By the way, there’s a screwed up belief among Christian teenagers and young adults: That you’re not having sex (and therefore not committing sin) if you don’t have intercourse. They would rationalize that anything leading up to intercourse is perfectly fine. Don’t be stupid. Read Jesus’ human ethics discourse in Matthew 5. Saying it’s okay to go past “third base” as long as you don’t go “all the way” is just a different twist on the legalism most young adults hate…making the Bible say what you want so you can manipulate people and get away with something. Read the previous paragraph again. Then read the next one.

Sex isn’t just a sensual, physical thing. It’s tied to the emotional and spiritual parts of us as well. From a Christian worldview, there’s no way to extricate sex from being a spiritual occurence. The unity of spirit, soul, and body are clear (1 Thess. 5:23). To live as redeemed humans we should guard our lives and others by refraining from engaging in less than human behavior (1 Peter:13-25). If anyone wonders why they still feel empty after pre-marital sex, that’s why.

Sex, in all of it’s pleasure and goodness, was designed to take place between a man and a woman that are married (Gen. 1:27; Mark 10:8). That’s why sex was intended to be shared as a physical, emotional and spiritual union with one’s husband or wife. Since the Scripture teaches we have spiritual/emotional/physical unity and a husband and wife become “one” (Mark 10:8) when they’re married, the clarity of sex only inside of marriage emerges.

The “one big question”
When I was reading that a husband should love his wife like Christ loved the church (like, he should be willing to die for her), I came up with the one big question that I think people should ask before they start having sex…especially pre-marital sex.

Christians need to honestly ask themselves if the person that they’re going to have sex with is the person that they’re willing to become “one” with for the rest of their life. Before they start getting all hot and bothered and taking off too many clothes, maybe they need to ask the “one big question”:

“Am I willing to die for the person I’m getting ready to have sex with?”

Question: Anyone have a better question/technique they use?

Two great books to read:

Sex God by Rob Bell

From Eternity To Here by Frank Viola

Be abnormal. Get pre-marital counseling.

I’ve seen a lot of marriages come and go in my 18 years of ministry and couneling. Below is my short list of why marriages fail.

People don’t do pre-marital counseling.
Let me be clear. You’re exercising really bad judgment if you don’t do premarital counseling. The next four things I mention and a lot more can be discussed and game-planned for before they come up later.

A study (Journal of Family Psychology (March 2006, Vol. 20, No. 1, 117-126) showed that couples that participated in pre-marital counseling were, on average, 31% less likely to divorce in any given year of their marriage than couples who did not benefit from this counseling.

People marry the wrong person.
Far too many people ask themselves, “What was I thinking?” in the first few months of marriage. It’s completely preventable. I’ve even told a few couples to not get married. There are some relationships that just won’t work no matter how attracted you are to them physically and emotionally.

People go into marriage with unrealistic expectations.
This is pretty much the majority of people that decide to get married. High idealism = high divorce rate.

People don’t know how to communicate well.
Okay, maybe it’s mostly us guys that don’t know how to communicate basic things well. The fact is, it’s rare when someone has been taught how to communicate well by their family system. We all need to get better at exchanging information instead of emotional salvos.

People don’t understand and know how do deal with extended family dynamics.
You have to know how each spouses family (in-laws) dynamics will affect your marriage. Most people don’t. If you choose to neglect his huge part of being married….let the fighting begin.

Find a counselor. Go to pre-marital counseling. Don’t know where to start? Click here and find someone in your area.

Affair-proofing your marriage

What a jerk
When you hear of someone that’s had an affair, typical response are, “They should be shot” or “You can’t be serious” or “That sorry…………” Fair enough. I’ve had two close family members suffer affairs. I’m not going to lie, I wanted to beat the living daylight out of the perp. They had wronged someone close to me and I wanted retribution.

Jerk. Self-centered jerk.

Someone that’s had an affair has made some very self-centered choices. They’ve chosen to meet their unmet emotional needs with quick fixes that seem to be the best or easiest option available. Unmet emotional needs puts them in a fog of unhealthy beliefs, rationalization of actions, and denial that a problem exists. So they keep driving through the fog and end up wrecking their life and the lives of their spouse, kids, in-laws and causing damage to friendships.

It takes two, baby
So who didn’t meet the emotional needs of the person that had the affair? We’re always quick to vilify the person that’s had the affair. What about the spouse that, for whatever reason, was being self-centered in their own right by not meeting the emotional needs of their mate?

To be clear, having an affair is wrong, injurious, narcissistic, and short-sighted. However…if a couple is going to thrive together they have to meet each other’s emotional needs. Meeting each others emotional needs is how to affair proof your marriage. Here’s a few to think about:

• Schedule time to talk with each other. You’re busy. You schedule everything else. Communicate with your spouse or they’ll find someone who will.
• Be the safest place for your spouse to rant. Emotional vomit is hard to handle but it doesn’t smell as bad the real stuff when you’re cleaning it up. When your spouse is hurting you have to be a component of their healing.
• Ask your spouse how they’re doing. We all like to talk about ourselves. Ask your spouse how their doing and be willing to listen.
  

• Have sex as often as necessary. If you don’t, your spouse is more likely to find someone who will (1 Cor. 7:1-2). If you do, you’re choosing a healthy view that’s the opposite of being self-centered (1 Cor. 7:3).

How have you affair-proofed your marriage?