Christmas Talks I Won’t Give (Yet)

I’m not preaching this Sunday, but I’ll speak a bit at two different services around Christmas Sunday. Letting my mind warm up a bit to the task, and inspired by one of our band leader’s desire to play a Rolling Stone song at our candlelight Christmas Eve service, here are three talk ideas I’m pretty sure I’ll never use.

Title #1: How to Think About Stupid Bureaucratic Requirements

Bible Verses: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (Luke 2:1)

Line from the Stones song Luke Suggested:

“When I’m drivin’ in my car, and the man come on the radio
He’s tellin’ me more and more about some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination”

Aspect of Christmas Story: Jesus was born in Bethlehem, fulfilling prophecy that he be a child of the city of David and heir to the expansion of David’s good rule over all the earth. This only occurs, though, through a bureaucratic fiat of a Roman emperor, that people return to their hometowns to comply with a census.

Theological Idea: God can work through all manner of human actions – regardless of their original intentions – to advance God’s good purposes,

Take-Home Thought: Stick it to the man… or just do what the man says… maybe it doesn’t always matter. Bullies don’t always win in the long run.

Title #2: When Life Gives You Lemons…

Bible Verses: And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7)

Line from the Stones song Luke Suggested*:

“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you might find
You get what you need”

Aspect of Christmas Story: Mary and Joseph travel to his hometown of Bethlehem, but find no first-class hospitality. Instead, they stay in the animal barn side of a neighbor’s home, and Jesus’ first bed isn’t a bassinet or crib, but a cow’s feeding trough.

Theological Idea: God’s child is born into the world into filthy conditions, the dirty Christmas baby underscoring that God joined the human race to be with us in all things.

Take-Home Thought: When life gives you lemons… remember that Jesus sucked on some pretty sour fruit himself. God can be with you in any circumstance.

Title #3: Sex is Complicated

Bible Verses: When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. (Matthew 1:24-25)

Line from the Stones song Luke Suggested*:

“I can’t get no satisfaction
I can’t get no girl reaction”

Aspect of Christmas Story: The virgin birth – as a teenager, engaged via arranged marriage to her future husband Joseph, Mary conceives the God-child not through conventional means, but by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Joseph and Mary refrain from sexual relations until after Jesus is born. It’s sort of the original “Jane the Virgin” story of first-time sex after childbirth.

Theological Idea: God can do anything. Also, Jesus is fully human and fully divine, and the first sign of this is the rather unusual method of his conception.

Take-Home Thought: If you’re engaged to a woman who’s experienced immaculate conception, be patient; it’s worth it. (Or maybe God does weird things now and then. Or something.)

^{*So technically, this is the song Luke suggested, and my first and third excerpts are from a different, even less suitable Stones song, but since this whole post is a joke, whatever…}

Faith and the City

At the invitation of a Reservoir member, I bopped across the river today to Boston University for an interesting event, called Faith and the City. It was hosted by BU’s interesting Initiative on Cities, founded in part by Boston’s former mayor, Tom Menino.

BU’s Dean of Marsh Chapel led a panel of clergy that have been associated with three of Boston’s more prominent religious institutions – Trinity Church, Charles St. A.M.E. Church, and the Islamic Society of Boston Cutlural Center. Rev. Rainey Dankel, Shaykh Yusif Fahmy, and Rev. Dr. Theodore Hickman-Maynard all discussed their experiences in leading faith communities that seek to be of relevance and service to their cities. They talked about the complexities of owning buildings in cities, serving communities from positions of both poverty and privilege, and the role they see their congregations playing at their best.

I came away with both thanks and questions.

I was so grateful for Reservoir Church as Rev. Hickman-Maynard talked about the challenges of churches in their old buildings. He described situations where churches own buildings they can’t properly fill and have to spend a quarter to a third of their budget simply maintaining the property. He described other situations where churches overspend on their facilities, assuming they are still the communal center of their city, when they no longer have that role in society.

This made me so glad for the blessing of our property. We own one of the largest church properties in the city of Cambridge, a property that takes considerable resources to maintain. But we share its use with the Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School, whose 350 students and their teachers and families use the space throughout the week. The Banneker gets a well-maintained property and an attentive and supportive landlord at a fair and reasonable price. And the church receives rent, which covers the majority of our facility costs. Both institutions and our city as a whole benefit from this shared space use. It’s really a great partnership.

I’m grateful too for our work as Reservoir in the City. For a dozen years now, we’ve been building relationships with the people who live and work in our neighborhood and we continue to build sustainable and mutually-edifying partnerships with individuals and organizations throughout the City of Cambridge. We are widely recognized as a church that loves our neighbors, and we partner with the public schools, the police, and our neighbors to sponsor events and meet needs in North Cambridge. We desire to serve and receive from our neighborhood in a spirit of joyful reciprocity, joining people and organizations that are doing great work in our community, and empowering our neighbors to become partners in projects that we work on together.

I’m so grateful for community potlucks, interfaith dinners, free soccer clinics, block parties, leadership development programs, and church-school partnerships that Reservoir participates in. Last week, I visited some of our elderly Muslim neighbors in their home. We ate together and exchanged gifts, they provided some religious instruction to my sons from the Quran. I prayed for their ailments in the name of Jesus. We left after much embracing. Another moment of the treasure it is for a faith community to share life in a city.

But today’s event left me with questions as well.

-In an era of decreasing participation in faith communities, do our communities still have resources to be vital participants in the life of our cities?

-In a time when religious institutions have often rightfully been seen as contributors to national and global problems, how can we be excellent civic partners in the flourishing our our communities?

-And in a time of enormous civic division and disconnectedness, could the cultivating of healthy and diverse community be one of the greatest balms a church can offer our times, while also one of the greatest displays of spiritual power we can offer?

I’m excited about some of the theological and missiological work Reservoir’s been part of in response to these questions. I’m also excited about our membership in the Christian Community Development Association and a growing partnership with Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, that will help us not to answer these questions alone.

Two Big, Hard, Exciting Things Jesus Wants to Help Us Do

I’ve mentioned that there are two things that God’s been leading me to think about as the year comes to close.

The first is our public sphere. After the most fear-driven, divisive, and utterly insane election season most of us ever remember, we’re both exhausted and compelled by our public sphere – what’s happening in the world we share, beyond our own personal day-to-day affairs.

This year’s public sphere – not just the presidential election, but all kinds of things out there in the big world – has for me renewed my commitment to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. If that sounds sort of familiar or at least a bit more poetic than you’d expect from me, it’s because it’s a (translated) line of poetry from the Bible.

The prophet Micah, somewhere late in the 7th century B.C., was inspired to say that this is what God wants out of people: for us to do justice, to love mercy and to talk humbly with God. He said this to people who were beleaguered and confused and troubled in ways that would feel familiar to you and me in its essence, if not in in detail.

This is probably the closest thing I have to a “life verse”, a single line in the Bible that motivates and inspires me to live as I hope to live.

Who’d argue that our public world couldn’t use more mercy and justice and walking with God that is both devout and humble. I could say a lot about each of these phrases, but for now, I’ll just state that all three of these qualities seem patently in too short supply – in our churches, out politics, our leaders, our followers, our business people, our educators, and, well, everyone and all our institutions. Mercy, justice, and walking humbly with God are frankly often enough lacking in my own heart and actions.

But to be those and to advocate those is where God’s leading me.

The second thing is to be engaged in community building.

We continue to discover just how divided and fractured the United States is, let alone just how divided we are from the rest of the world we alternatively sell things to, and give things to, and bomb, and bless, and ignore.

The rest of the world aside, though, our country is more racist, less hospitable, more judgmental, less united, and angrier than may of us thought it was. From all corners, really.

On this second work of community building, I expect I’ll do some more blogging in the days ahead on insights from the powerful, insightful book Disunity in Christ, by the social psychologist and Christian leader Christena Cleveland. It’s really an extraordinary book that you’ll want to read, but I’ll at least share a few of its insights and applications with you.

Mercy, justice, and a humble walk with God.

Diverse community building of empathy and love.

Both of these things seem counter-evolutionary to me, contrary to our nature. We evolved to be tribal people, to protect our own. Our tendencies to hive off are shared with most of the animal kingdom and serve well to protect us against external threats.

But they’re contrary to the thing that Jesus seems to long to do in human story – to break down dividing walls with love and forgiveness; to establish societies of justice and mercy; to teach us to walk humbly with God; to restore all things.

This is purely speculative, of course, but I can picture God looking at our pale blue dot of a planet, seeing the human society that he created through physical and chemical and evolutionary processes set into motion billions of years ago, and thinking it’s too bad about the underbelly of all that worked out.

The story of my faith tradition, though, is that in Jesus, God has entered into human history to redeem the sin of the world and to reunite humanity to God.

I’ve got to think some of the fruit of this is a maturation of human society toward justice and peace and mercy, and the creation of communities of unity and love. Much of the New Testament of the Bible is a testament to the spiritual power Jesus has to move cooperating people and community toward these ends.

That’s what I’m leading in toward Jesus for as well.

It’s what I invite you to as well in this Christmas season.

When people lean in toward mercy and justice and a humble walk with God, and when people – as individuals and with the institutions we are part of – when people love as God loves, Jesus is there.

Freedom in Talking Theology, and an Amazing Talk on that Front

This is a longish post to introduce you to a stunner of a longish talk at the recent Blue Ocean summit. If my writing bores you and you want to get straight to Emily Swan’s fascinating talk, then have it.

Now for the introduction:

I was listening in on three of my friends having kind of a crazy conversation recently. They were having it in public, over on the Blue Ocean podcast, so I wasn’t eavesdropping. And my friend Tom told a story that captured something that I’ve been thinking about, and apparently something a bunch of my pastor friends have been thinking about as well.

Tom talked about a time when he gave a talk about evolution and Jesus and what a freeing experience that was for him. As a psychiatrist whose work interacts significantly with evolutionary genetics, Tom is rarely asked to talk about Jesus. And with his part-time hobby as preacher and pastor, Tom had rarely found his work and thinking on evolution to be welcome. In fact, his interest in science and career as a scientist was often viewed suspiciously.

So how freeing it was for Tom to be invited to give a talk on Jesus and evolution, in which he could think and speak freely, without fear that he would be censored or perceived as a threat.

I’ve been thinking recently about how rare this freedom it is when it comes to public talk about God, faith, and meaning in life.

Academia prides itself on cultivating a free and rigorous life of the mind pursuit. Researchers and thinkers try on new ideas and explore new perspectives and data, and see where it takes them. The process of research and peer-reviewed publishing and after-session chats at conferences helps people explore new intellectual territory that sometimes eventually shapes us all.

The business marketplace often rewards this kind of adventuresome thinking as well. Entrepreneurs and innovators are encouraged to try new ideas and methodologies and are often rewarded, rather than stigmatized, for failure, if said failed ventures were big and bold in its aspirations.

When it comes to people that talk about God and faith for a living, though, there’s an awful lot of fear and censorship. I’ve known pastors who tried out a novel idea in a sermon and were fired within a month or two. Many theological institutions, particularly our more conservative ones, encourage writing and scholarship only to the degree it arrives at pre-set conclusions about the Bible, or aspects of God’s nature or how God works in the world.

All of this means leads to a climate of fear around our deepest questions related to faith. Pastors fear sharing their true thoughts with churchgoers. Churchgoers fear sharing their real doubts or asking their thorniest questions. And no one learns anything new.

I’m incredibly glad to pastor and teach at a church where this isn’t true. Where people don’t assume I have to teach with supreme confidence or an infallible set of views on things. And I’m glad to be part of a faith network where people can freely explore big, bold views on spiritual issues.

All this to say, when a hundred or so folks gathered for the recent Blue Ocean Summit, this year held in Iowa City, Emily Swan gave the talk of the conference when she spoke about the theology of Rene Girard. Girard was a literary critic and deep thinker who came to the Bible and the Christian faith later in life and then never left either.

He is notoriously hard to read, a reputation I can agree with after reading one of his books on the Bible. He also has a theory of everything. He purports to explain the origins of human society, the nature of evil in the world, the message of the Bible, the meaning of most ancient literature, the unique and abiding power of the death of Jesus, and much more! So there’s a lot to take in. And – of course – as with all big ideas, he may not have it all right.

But Emily gives us a way in to Girard’s thoughts about what’s wrong with the world and what Jesus does about it that is deep, fascinating, vulnerable, and powerful.

I hope you enjoy this talk nearly as much as I did:

2016 Blue Ocean Summit Talk: Introducing René Girard, by Emily Swan

Prayer Workshop

Join us on December 4th in the Ministry Center Living Room for a Prayer Workshop! This workshop is open to anyone who is new to faith, wants a refresher or is just curious. Come and receive more of the Holy Spirit, hear from God, pray for the sick, heal emotional needs and experience intimacy with Jesus through Immanuel Prayer. Check out our events for more information!

Be Patient, Oh Tortoise

At Reservoir’s fall retreat, I read this poem on Saturday morning to introduce a time of reflection and prayer. I shared that at first, it seemed to be a funny poem about a stupid animal. Then over time, I realized that it is also a funny poem about a stupid me. I am so slow to learn, and God is so eager to forgive me and to be with me and enjoy my slow learning.

Scott Cairns: On Slow Learning

If you have ever owned
a tortoise, you already know
how difficult paper training can be
for some pets.

Even if you get so far
as to instill in your tortoise
the the value of achieving the paper
there remains one obstacle –
your tortoise’s intrinsic sloth.

Even a well-intentioned tortoise
may find himself, in his journeys
to be painfully far from the mark.

Failing, your tortoise may shy away
for weeks within his shell,
utterly ashamed, or looking up with tiny,
wet eyes might offer an honest shrug.
Forgive him.

–Scott Cairns, “Slow Learner” in Compass of Affection: New and Selected Poems (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 5.

However you are slow or challenged today, take it easy on yourself.
Jesus is eager to take it easy on you.

Resources for Engaging in Action in a Broken World

Last week, I spoke on our value for action. Here’s the phrase again that guides us.

Action: Love for Jesus compels us to act—to seek justice, show compassion, work for reconciliation, and hope for transformation in joyful engagement with the world.

We also shared some information on ways that individuals and community groups can be engaged in action this fall. Here they are:

ACTION IN THE RESERVOIR CHURCH COMMUNITY, FALL 2016

Reservoir in the City

Assist a local public school through weekly tutoring, or helping run a monthly subsidized market for our local school and community. (Contact: Tory Tolles – tory@reservoirchurch.org)
Attend or help host Ladies’ nights at the Fresh Pond Apartments. Celebrate femininity with henna, threading, food, and music. (Contact: Tory Tolles – tory@reservoirchurch.org)
Attend or help host Soccer Sundays. Build athletic skill and sportsmanship while playing soccer with young people in North Cambridge. (Contact: Cate Nelson – cate@reservoirchurch.org)

Help Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) get out the vote for Boston’s Community Preservation Act (CPA), setting aside more municipal funding for affordable housing, green space expansion and reservation, and historic preservation. To learn more about CPA or to offer help contacting voters living in Boston, go to https://www.sites.google.com/site/gbiocpacampaign/home, talk to Sue Rosenkranz after service today, or email Sarah Outterson-Murphy at soutterson@gmail.com.

Join Tory in attending GBIO’s three-day (11/11-11/13) training on community organizing. (Contact: Tory Tolles – tory@reservoirchurch.org)

Other Reservoir-Related Ventures

Give to a scholarship fund for a displaced college-bound teen our community has been supporting. Over the coming year, we will be looking for further ways to support less privileged college-going youth in our community. (Contact: Dorothy Hanna – dorothy@reservoirchurch.org)

Give to Reservoir Church. Ten percent of tithes and offerings go to local and global partnerships with people and organizations we admire who are pursuing justice, compassion, reconciliation, or transformation. These are highlighted every Sunday your Events and Happenings. Much more of our budget supports our local outreach and efforts at community engagement and transformation.https://www.reservoirchurch.org/about/giving/

Community Resources, Actions of our Members

Peruse the A.R.T.’s list of Boston-area groups working in the areas of education, youth, criminal justice, or racial and economic justice, and offer your time and support. http://americanrepertorytheater.org/page/notes-field-get-involved

Participate in a day trip to get out the vote in NH on Saturday, November 5^th. Training will be provided on site, pizza and beer afterwards. (Contact: Val Snekvik – val.snekvik@gmail.com)

In your own workplace or field of work, look for ways you can pursue justice, compassion, reconciliation, or transformation. Big impacts often take significant and long efforts over many years. Start with what’s in front of you, and see what you and partners can accomplish in fifteen or twenty years.

Buy granola from our friends at The Providence Granola Project, who employ and train refugees in producing a healthy, tasty product for you. http://www.providencegranola.com/

Ask your friends and community group members at Reservoir what they are doing to pursue justice, compassion, reconciliation, or transformation. See if you can participate.

Having a Blast in the Neighborhood

Last night was our first night of Soccer Nights. This is our ninth year running a free week of soccer, leadership development, and city unity in our neighborhood of North Cambridge. We’ve inspired other Soccer Nights programs around the city and in a few other spots in the country, but we love ours the most of course.

We had 203 six to twelve year-old children get out of their apartments and be together, learning to pass soccer balls while playing on a team and having a great time! A bevy of young children and parents played together in our 3-to-5 year old division. Nearly 20 thirteen to fifteen year-olds are enrolled in CREW, our leadership development and volunteer program. And another 75+ community volunteers coached, set up the field, served snacks, hosted parents, and organized tonight. Multi-generation Cantibrigians talked and played and danced alongside immigrants from Ethiopia and Bangladesh and Somalia and Haiti and Eritrea and Jamaica and China and more.

It was a beautiful night.

Our church is passionate about loving without agenda, and it is a gift to see the fruit of years of this commitment. Former Soccer Nights players are coaching now. A past parent participant is serving as official photographer. A former member of our youth ministry is directing the whole program, while other graduates of our youth ministry serve as interns and a past director serves under her as a division leader.

Tonight, one of our leaders said to me, “Hey, this is kind of like that ‘Art of Neighboring’ thing we talked about this spring! Is there a connection?”

You betcha.

The art of neighboring for all of us is learning to find the life Jesus promises in loving our neighbor as ourselves, learning that this command is integrally linked to the experience of loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and experiencing God’s great love for us.

We neighbor as a church by encouraging us all to notice and love the people where we work and live, but we neighbor together as Reservoir in the City by noticing and loving our beautifully diverse and vibrant neighborhood of North Cambridge.

Beyond Soccer Nights, we’ve had some other fun and rewarding adventures in neighboring this month. We co-hosted with our Muslim neighbors our annual Iftar – the post-sunset dinner that Muslims share in community to break their fast each night during the month of Ramadan. This is a beautiful evening of peace-making and friendship and eating of big plates of delicious Bengali food!

This year, in my mini-talk, I reminded my Christian and Muslim neighbors of a story Isa al-Masih (Jesus the Messiah in Arabic, an honored and beloved prophet in Muslim religion) told in the Injil (Arabic for the New Testament). I told them that Isa said God is like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep and a woman looking for a lost coin, that as we fast and search for God, we can remember that God is also searching for us.

The picture below is actually from another Iftar this month, when my family and the Tolles family joined my friend pictured here, the imam Ismail Fenni, and a number of other city residents for a shared meal at the mosque in Central Square.

Earlier this month, we also baked and bought cookies for teachers in three local schools. Six volunteers baked and shared 350 cookies to appreciate 174 educators in these three schools in our neighborhood. One principal was so appreciative that a conversation ensued about a further partnership between that school and our church.

Big props to our Reservoir in the City part-time staff team – Cate Nelson, Tory Tolles, and Alice Liu, to our many dedicated volunteers, to all those that contribute financially to this church, and to our remarkable neighborhood where we get to love and neighbor without agenda.

It’s so good to be your neighbor, and to neighbor together!

(The Watsons, Iftaring together…)

More pictures of non-Watson neighbors to come…!

When Bad News Hits

Last week was a doozy, wasn’t it? Sunday, just as I was wrapping up our second service at church, I heard the news of the late night mass shooting in Orlando. Of the 49 killed, there was an accountant, a star athlete, a bouncer, a bartender, a restaurant manager, a young man described as a “cool dude” and “an angel” for his extraordinary kindness. They were sons, daughters, friends, fellow humans. The great majority were LGBTQ persons and persons of color, as well. They were targeted by another young man who claimed to be inspired by radical Islamic funamentalism, including ISIS, and may or may not have been a closeted gay man himself, certainly a relevant topic for consideration if that proves to be true.

But I’m not in a position to analyze. I’m no expert on the events, and it’s likely too soon, certainly for an outsider and amateur like me. I just know that every time I checked the news or even looked at my facebook feed, I saw and heard more, and was paralyzed by a low level grief. On top of that, despite this being a pretty awesome week in my own life in many, many ways, I had the news from a dear friend of a potentially deeply worrisome health diagnosis. So that was on my mind as well.

Thursday, I found myself unable to get much done. Until I noticed that, did a few things, and then went on my way with a fair measure of joy and peace. Nothing I did was all that original, but in case it helps, I’ll share with you all.

I took a walk. The picture for this post, in fact, is the gorgeous and enormous old oak tree in a park I like to walk through and pray in now and then. Andy Crouch, in his book Strong and Weak, presents a 2 by 2 chart that outlines the various ways humanity flourishes or doesn’t. The polar opposite of flourishing in his chart is withdrawal, when we have or exercise no capacity for meaningful action, and we open ourselves up to low or no risk or vulnerability.

For folks living in safety and security, we easily hide from the scariness of the big world by retreating into safe and meaningless withdrawal. For me, this looks like endless and mind-numbing facebook scrolling, for instance. Crouch says that one of our simplest paths out of withdrawal is just this.

“Turn off your devices and go for a walk or a run, not just on days when the weather is pleasant but on days when the wind is fierce, the rain is falling or the humidity is high. Shiver or sweat, feel fatigue in your limbs, hear the sounds of the city or the country side unfiltered by headphones. Choose to go to places – the ocean, the mountains, or a broad, wide field – where you will feel small rather than grand.” (90)

My walk did just this – connected me with the big, wondrous world and gave me a moment of perspective taking.

As I walked, I started to pray. I prayed for the victims of the Oralndo shooting and for their families. I prayed for the shooter, and for his family. I prayed for our nation and our attachment to guns and our addiction to violence. I lamented the outrageous state of things in our world, on so many fronts. I prayed for my worried friend and his family.

And in a little prayer book I’ve been using to lead and inspire me, I came across this prayer: Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace each of us may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ…” And that felt timely to pray and guided me toward the kind of spirit and action I want to embrace.

Then I did a couple of things that were in my power. On the advice of one activist I follow on facebook, I checked in on a few LGBTQ friends of mine, asked how they were doing, told them they had my prayers and love and support. I signed a petition related to gun violence. I made a note to myself to say something and lead out in prayer the next Sunday in church.

And then I got away from my newsfeed, and I looked to love the people in my path and to live with purpose and joy, as best I could. I find that when any kind of big news hits, certainly when tragedy strikes, it’s easy to go numb watching video after video, reading article after article, taking in outraged social media post after post. I first experienced this in the aftermath of 9/11, when all of us – myself included – couldn’t stop watching those planes crash into those buildings.

But I’ve learned that this ceaseless feeding of my brain with images and outrage only paralyzes me. It doesn’t increase compassion or lead me to any kind of productive action. So I shut it off and checked in on my kids, wrote a couple of notes to friends, and kept an eye out for my next chance to connect or to serve or to be useful. I continue to think about this, almost each day.

This path may not be yours, but it’s been the best I’ve known how to do. And it’s helped keep me awake and alive, even in what sometimes feel like dark days.

Resources for Financial Freedom

Last week, as part of our Flourishing series, I preached on Moving from Financial Shame and Anxiety Toward Freedom. It was pretty well received, and I personally think it would be a rich use of forty minutes of your time. I heard a lot of appreciative comments, and almost a third of the adults in the room committed to a 90-day tithing challenge as well.

Tips #2 and #3 at the end were:

Learn from the world’s best (and free) financial resources, and
Make the hard choices today for a better tomorrow, and a better today.

I was encouraging people to break patterns of anxiety around our finances not just by giving more – as important as that is – but by also figuring out the disciplined moves we can make to bring our financial lives into greater order and health.

I’m no personal finance expert, but I promised to pass along a few resources that have helped me or been recommended to me by good friends or facebook acquaintance friends.

So, here they are.

First off, if you need any more reading on just how big of an issue this is in America, here’s the article from The Atlantic that I lead with. “My Secret Shame” is a pretty powerful and sobering look at Americans’ personal finances, through the lens of one man’s struggles.

Next, my favorite book I’ve read on the topic: All Your Worth, by Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. Your local library likely has it. The Warrens commend a financial balance, where no more than 50% of your income pays for true “must-haves”, where you devote a full 20% to savings or paying down bad debt, and where you’re left with 30% of your income for “wants”, which would include everything from music lessons for your children to shopping for new clothes, to eating out, and more. They have a ton of other great advice, on everything from bringing these categories into alignment, to helpfully navigating money issues with your partner, to dealing with frustration and blame around your finances, to what to do when your case seems hopeless. I shift her proportions to account for giving as 10-20% of our family budget, but they get things started well.

Several Christian friends swear by the resources Dave Ramsey produces, particularly his seven baby steps, which they say have helped them and others get out of debt, stop getting into debt, and give generously while living well. I’ve never read his stuff, so I can’t comment either way.

Many friends have used the website Mint to help them understand where all their money is going, which helps them gain awareness and change their spending patterns. Others have used You Need a Budget, and the work of Mr. Money Moustache for these purposes – to rethink spending and money priorities.

A few other have learned a great deal about personal finances from Suze Orman or a book called The Richest Man in Babylon.

If you can afford it, others recommend an appointment with a fee-based financial advisor (one who makes no money by selling you products), being entirely truthful, and seeing what advice you get.

Whichever of these tools you use, may you move out of the fear and shame of financial bondage and into freedom!