Fear or Confidence-A Question of Balance

In tough financial times like these the choice always seems to lie between fear and confidence. Simply put, we fear running out of money and lose confidence in the support of the financial systems around us. Then everybody stops spending and begins to hoard their money out of fear. Result: recession.

When times are good we’re confident that our supply will be there tomorrow and so we buy what we need – not necessarily what we want, but what we need. We live civilized, without fear, in a state of grateful ‘enough’.

There is, unfortunately, a third choice that has no reality, no practicality. It is the selfish choice of overspending – better known as debt.

America is clearly at the result of this third choice today. And it’s not just big business, government and Wall Street that is to blame. It is the gross misconception that we, as Americans, deserve to have more than we produce. It is an unbalance of reality, a confusion of the truth.

Several years ago my wife and I cancelled all of our credit cards. I was an abuser of this faulty system. Gratefully I woke up one day and saw the light, and today we buy what we can afford. If I can’t afford something I need, then I work harder for it. I save for it. I am a happier man for this practice. We now live relatively debt free, separating the needs from the wants, buying only what we can afford. Once we got used to living this way, we found ourselves much happier and freer.

This is the true American way. Hard work and good thinking is the foundation that America was built on. Today America staggers because it has lost touch with its foundational thinking. Most Americans live in debt, that is, live out of balance with reality.

Our times simply reflect our thinking as a nation. It is time to rebalance. It is time to live clean.

This does not mean that we should live in fear and hoard. That too is a mistake. We must return quickly to confidence, to balance.

Confidence in what? Government? Big business? Wall Street? Heavens no! Rather, confidence in the eternal fact that God supplies. God directs. God controls. “Ask and it shall be given” is the Bible’s imperative. But I don’t believe that this means that God goes on supplying those who greed when debt is the result of greed.

I believe that God supplies those who need. That means that those who produce, receive supply equal to the quality of their production. What goes out comes back in. I understand that this is the way it works. I understand it because I see the principle manifested this way in my life.

I cannot speak for the poor. I’ve been penniless, but never poor. Poverty is a trapped mindset, a depression of hope. We, as a people, are just as responsible for poverty as we are for greed and gluttony. They are the two ends of the spectrum of human thought.

What can we do about it? Pray for the extremes and live clean. Give to the poor when we can and actively protest those who greed, but first clean up the poverty and gluttony in our own lives. First balance our own individual lives. Regain confidence in the right source of supply, the open font and spend God’s gifts wisely.

A rebalancing at this time is good, but we all need to participate. We all need to do our part, however small, in the rebalancing of America. If everybody stopped and reconsidered the balance of supply in their lives and adjusted accordingly, I can’t imagine that this would not be once more a nation of financial confidence.