Financial Lesson #1: Discerning your Needs and Wants
I told you my financial wisdom would not be overly complicated or deep, and lesson #1 is no exception. You must sit down (and if you are married, you both need to sit down) and draw up a list of your basic NEEDS (That you spend money on). To make this easy, do not start with what you see in and around your house, start with what you will be purchasing from this point forward. As an example person myself, here is an example.
Jack and Jill sit down and start their list of NEEDS. Immediately the basics come to mind: Food and Shelter. They break shelter down into clothes and rent (including heat, electricity etc). Now to get the money to purchase food they would need an income, thus their jobs. And to keep their job they each need transportation to work and occasionally work appropriate clothing. Jill thought back to here psychology days and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and suggested they did have some ’emotional’ needs that might be hard to countify. In the end they came up with these needs: FOOD, SHELTER, TRANSPORTATION, MISC (Clothing, soap, etc) and EMOTIONAL.
But, that’s not the end of the lesson. Things get a little more complicated at this point. Does “Food” mean eating out three times a week and coffee at Bongo Java every morning? Are those NEEDS? You must discern on your own what part of your “food” is meeting your basic needs and what part is fulfilling your WANTS. The same goes for clothing. You might NEED button down shirts and dressy shoes for on the job, but you don’t NEED name brand clothing to wear out on the town. Getting to work is a Transportation NEED, driving across town to the outlet mall is not. Does that make some sense?
As you think through your needs, be sure to write down the things you’ve discerned are WANTS in another column (eating out, coffee, shopping trips, new sweaters).
Your Assignment for this week: Spend money as you normally have in the past, but be very concious of how much you are spending on Needs and how much on WANTS. Keep track of actual purchases if you’d like. And see if thinking through these lists actually changes what you spend money on through out the week.
…Lesson #2: Giving
They where obviously painted a few centuries ago. They didn’t look exactly like this but similar. By similar I mean it was the long haired white Jesus we seem to see portrayed everywhere we look. So much so I think we actually think he looked something like that. Now I don’t know much about historical looks and fashions but I’m fairly confident that is NOT what he looked like. 
In fact, I just so happened to see that educational show the other day where they went through all kinds of evidence and have come to the conclusion that he looked something like this. I’m really not quite sure if they are right, but at least they gave it a good long consideration.
Now the reason I’m bringing this up is mainly that I think it’s a dangerous and troubling thing that we’ve got all these white Jesus pictures hanging around. The main argument I hear in response when I bring this up is that they are historical, and thus because of their history have value, regardless of how inaccurate they are. I think that is just ridiculous. I also hear people talk about how Jesus becomes like one of us, so a white church can have a white Jesus, a Hispanic church can have a Hispanic Jesus, etc. Now if we are happy and content with our racial divided churches then this might seem slightly feasible, especially if we wanted to promote our racial superiority in our theology (That was extremely sarcastic and I hope you see the terrible flaws in it). I’ll write more at some point about the damage these sorts of imagery cause to children with different skin colors (then the one on the Jesus picture).
If you haven’t run across this icon in the last few months you probably haven’t been online period (or on my site since it’s sitting right over there on the sidebar). What is this funny orange symbol you ask? and why does it matter?