Money For Morals

Dear Evangelicals (and Family):

I’ve seen a fair share of complaints about the money consciousness of my generation – that’d be the baby boomers – on social media. Oddly enough, I sympathize.

I have never known someone with money who hasn’t used the threat of withholding it to break – with all the violence and vindictiveness that implies – some aspect of someone's character that has nothing to do with getting and spending.

If that’s what you’re going through, let me do that thing we tiresome, old blowhards are prone to do -- lay some wisdom on you:

Why let someone who’s just as human as you are, tell you who you are, where and if you belong, and why you’re here? Why let them decide if you’re acceptable?

If the price of being part of a family – whatever that means to you – is to let someone decide what role you play in the family, dump ‘em. You can make friends, a family, a living, and a life without selling out under threat.

The corollary to this is that, if you’re threatening to cut a “loved one” off financially in some twisted effort to punish them for living out their core values, you are a greedy, reprehensible pig.

You are probably also living a lie – a big one. It wounds you to the core that someone you thought you could control has the guts to be who they are, publicly and privately.

To you, I say that, if you can’t manage your own life, you have no business trying to manage someone else’s. Look in the mirror, and clean up your own mess first. Then, you can think about dispensing advice to someone else.

How do you do that? How do you climb out of the filth and live authentically?

See the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post. Your … beneficiaries are already way ahead of you.

As the United States Declaration of Independence puts it, you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That means you have the right to the femme name and the pink negligee. You have the right to exercise the spiritual gifts, and rock a Bible app on your phone. You have the right to vote Republican for the first time in your family’s history. You have the right to champion astrology over the enneagram. The right to counsel the old man to tell the truth for once in his miserable life.

If you don’t think that any one of those things is as controversial as the others in certain circles, you need to get out more. If you don’t think that all these issues can be at work in one person’s life, you need to get out even more.

But I digress.

If you’ve spent your life living a lie, how do you climb out of the filth and live authentically?

Tell someone. Tell the people who mean more to you than anyone else. If they bail, you’re ahead of the game, because you’re no longer burdened by people who hate you.

See the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post – again. And again and again, if it helps. Do your crying for as long as you need to. Then, get back up, fix your face, and find a real family.