Financial Stewardship (Cont., yes, still)

Ah, housing worked out until wedding. Now my fiancee and I just need a place to live. But I guess God has some time to deal with that problem. Now I just need to figure out if there's a way to make God work on my timetable enjoy God's current provision and patiently relax about his future provision. It's amazing how something so simple can be such a challenge.

Financial Stewardship (Cont.)

It's interesting how God works. And by 'interesting', I mean a strange combination of bizarrely fascinating and gut-wrenchingly painful. Alright, I admit it isn't always like that. But sometimes...

So last time I posted about wrestling with the struggle between planning and trusting God in being a good steward, and how often good stewardship through planning seemed to thwart trusting God. Since then, my fiancee and I are still trying to figure out our post-wedding living arrangements that are both budget conscientious and priority driven. For example, we'd really like a place where we can easily invite others and that's central to our community of friends, church, and work. And then we have some luxuries we'd really like (washer and dryer).

On the tricky side, my lease is officially up a few months before the wedding, so there's this weird transition period where I have flexibility. My preference, naturally, is to go ahead and find a place that meets all of our criteria and spend a several hundred extra bucks to have the place to myself for a few months. Meanwhile God seems to be extending my current living situation (which is definitely more cost effective) a few more months, but there's no sign of a place to move to.

In theory, of course, moving from my place (given a roommate & reasonable rent) shortly before the wedding is a highly economical plan. But I don't like the uncertainty and doubt that surrounds that approach. And it makes me realize how quickly I toss out stewardship principles to bring certainty into my life.

Wanted: Financial Manager of $2,000,000

We started a new series on money this week at church. Nothing too earth shattering since I've had the good fortune of working through several different biblical studies on finances. But a couple thoughts that stood out to me.

I was talking with a friend today about three different axis involved in having a biblically sound financial aspect. One is the heart of spending - selfish vs. generous, a second of wisdom (e.g. budget or impulse spending), and the third is the fearful vs. calm spectrum: Do I trust God to meet my needs?

The irony is that there are many people who are fiscally responsible out of selfishness and distrust of God's provision. (This is my natural leaning - why spend irresponsibly and get myself in trouble later?) And then there are those who love giving and spending but never plan ahead, and call it trusting God. The problem, of course, is that it disregards most of the biblical principles on financial matters.

On the flip-side, I was talking to my friend about what it means to have trust in God when one also has an solid emergency account. If I'm relaxed and secure, is it because I have great faith in God, or because I know that rarely does God inflict Job-like disasters on middle-class Americans with wise savings habits? (At least, in my small sample size, it's rare.)

There's something unsettling that doing the right thing seems to make trusting God financially more of an intellectual exercise than anything else.

A Quick Rembrance

In light of the recent political uproar regarding Senator Obama and assorted racial comments, it reminds me of the firestorm that Michigan went through 18 months ago regarding the highly controversial Proposition 2. I heard lots of impassioned arguments about the disaster it would be. And since then, silence. Even the Wikipedia entry hasn't really updated with the actual impact of Proposition 2.

I wonder - do we know the results yet? If we do, do we remembered what we argued, why, and whether it matched reality?

Everyone should be an engineer...mahahaha

So I spent most of today at work trying to solve the fact that three systems which work beautifully individually don't work together at all. On the rare occasions when system Alpha interacts with Beta or Gamma, the result is roughly a blue screen of death. (Of course, we have a much prettier blue screen of death, but when all the glitz and glamor is stripped away, it's still just a blue screen.)

I realized today that most people probably never deal with the complexity of trying to get all the systems to work together. Tax returns are probably a good equivalent, but most of us get someone else to do our taxes. I wonder if architects and builders sympathize with the problem. Do they ever just finish the cafeteria when another architect comes over and says "What have you done? This space was for the geckos!"

Justice

I've been contemplating the meaning of justice lately. (And yes, I've been planning on blogging on this topic even without my car getting broken into. But it did lead to some amusing moments like this:

Nice insurance guy: Was the car locked?

Me: Yes - presumably that's why they broke the window.

Me thinking: You know, I'm not a member of the Frequent Auto Burglars Association, but generally I assume that the reason burglars break car windows is because the car was locked. Now maybe there's a bunch of thieves that just break the windows without checking, but in that case, it doesn't really matter if the car was locked or not, does it?

Anyway, I've been contemplating justice. What does it mean to advocate justice in the United States? More welfare for the poor? More homeless shelters? Higher taxes for the rich? Bigger jails to hold car thieves? Making lawsuits harder? Making medical malpractice suits easier?

I've been realizing how much I tend to think of justice in a handful of options - jail time, fines, or death. But rarely do those options seem like effective executions of justice.

I am not a squirrel

Some kind soul at work today brought in a bag of sun flower seeds. The instructions read roughly this: "Put the seed in your mouth, crack the seed, eat the nut, spit out the sunflower seed. Advanced eaters will put many seeds in their mouth, put them on one side of their mouth, and then eat them, moving the empty seed husks to the other side of their mouth."

I can't even manage to properly crack the seeds with my mouth, let alone doing many seeds simultaneously. The seed and nuts cracks and splinters horribly on every attempt - I'm lucky my mouth doesn't have splinters. I've decided I'm definitely not part squirrel.

Meanwhile I've been contemplating the problem of reality. No, not that problem. This one: Stories are engaging because they develop themes in a short time. Whether it's a RPG computer game, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Troy (the movie), Dungeons & Dragons, or a camp fire, a story with epic theme(s) is told in a matter of hours. It's engaging, it's powerful, it's moving. Life, on the other hand, tends to grind along. The parts that are skipped over in a line or page in the stories aren't bypassed in life. And the themes often aren't visible until years - or decades - later. Often they won't be known until I'm dead.

So here's my thought: Escapism is very attractive. Given the choice between a pleasant but challenging evening doing chores or a few hours reading a novel, it's easy to choose the novel. It's just so hard to keep a biblical perspective about what God is doing day after day. It's great to talk about God redeeming us to be like him, or him working everything for our good, or helping others to know him. But in the middle of the 3rd load of laundry, the tenth hour after an untraceable computer bug, or the umpteenth wedding detail, I don't have much faith that I'm greatly -- or trivially -- advancing the kingdom of God.

I'm trying to figure out how to maintain perspective. Thus far, my primary discovery is that I don't do it very well.

Economics 102: Why do houses appreciate?

So the common wisdom is that houses appreciate. Here's a fun mental exercise: Why do houses appreciate?

I mean fundamentally, I'd expect houses to follow the paths of other objects and depreciate. My 12 year old car is worth less today than when I bought it 4 years ago. Excluding antiques (which are valuable because of scarcity and sentimental/scientific appeal), objects generally decay and rust with time. And most of us prefer non-decayed non-rusty objects.

Given that houses are objects, and that they decay with time in a myriad of ways, why do we expect houses to appreciate? Here's my list:

1. Land & Demand: House prices generally include land, and land is a very fixed quantity. Given that the earth's population is growing, we'd expect land to become more valuable. It's not necessarily guaranteed that the population will grow, but typically, despite our violent nature, human population has grown.
   
   
2. Society/Location: Locations change in how much they are worth. A bad school system improving to a good school system will improve demand. Businesses providing jobs or services nearby make a location nicer. Likewise, a business going away can drop nearby value.
   
   
3. Environment/Location: Environmental issues (the discovery of pollution, failed levees, or new fault lines) also shift a location's value.
   
   
4. Relative Wealth: This idea is similar to the limited supply of land: If more people have more money, they may be willing to pay more for housing, thus driving the price of homes up.

That's off the top of my head. It's not a complete list, and I suspect economists would have a lot more points to make. But it's an interesting question to ponder: Why is my home going to appreciate when my car doesn't? (And, if I sleep in my car, will it appreciate?)

What points would you add?

Halo: Intelligent Design or Evolution

I've decided that I haven't irritated my evolution-friendly readers enough lately, so here's a post designed to do exactly that. (Actually, most of the irritation is in the title, because I'm pitting design against chance, and chance isn't a good representation of evolution without an extended argument about whether or not chance is a fair representation. But I digress...)

This halo video poses an interesting question: How do we assign probabilities of various events to past outcomes? (Here is another example.)

Were the kills in these videos designed or random chance? If they were designed, was this the first try or were there many attempts? Was the grenade death the intended goal, or merely a side-effect of another goal? Were the videos faked? (Note that just because the videos faithfully render a genuinely possible scenario in the halo universe doesn't mean that they aren't faked. Of course, if they render an impossible scenario, they are certainly fakes.)

Here's the tricky part: Can we decisively differentiate between the possibilities from just the video? Assume we can't communicate with the original posters, are the videos, a community of experts, and our own XBox 360s enough to settle the question?

Appropriately Welcomed

So I spent Saturday helping my church organize one of our training sessions for our greeting team. One of its main ideas was the idea of appropriately welcoming guests. One of the great aspects of a large church is the ability to be anonymous when checking it out. One of the difficulties is feeling important and relevant when one has a question. The idea of appropriately welcoming guests means not pouncing on the people who want to be left alone, but also helping the people who, well, want help.

Fast forward twenty-four hours, and I was attending a bridal show and checking out all the vendors. It's striking to me how the same principle applied: Often I was standing around, mildly interested in a vendor, but not really knowing what to ask or how to start the conversation. The vendor would say hi - or perhaps just ignore me - but didn't try to engage me and find out what I wanted. I'm not sure I wanted the product to begin with, but I certainly didn't make a mental note to check out that vendor's site when I got home.

Other vendors did a good job of saying hello, asking about my interest, and providing a relevant spiel. They were enthusiastic and informed, and while they didn't overwhelm me with sales pitches, they answered my questions and invited me to ask more. Intellectually, I know that people skills and competence don't go together, but emotionally I feel warmer toward these vendors. They certainly presented themselves better - and I'll probably check them out again.

(And yes, there were the vendors that launched sales pitches at me no matter what I said? "What, you want to move to Africa? Well, you need a $10,000 2,000lb cooking set, brand new. Sign up now and you can win a free cruise - nevermind if you are easily motion sick...")

It's weird to look at how a very basic Christian principle "Love people; be hospitable." intersects with the capitalistic business principle of "sales."

Tax Deductions

Alright, pop quiz: What's a $1,000 tax deduction worth to you?

That's what I've been puzzling over recently. As far as I can tell, the answer at most about $330. Assuming that I'm uber-rich and being taxed at 28%, plus that I can somehow get the deduction on my state (4%) and local (1%) taxes, a $1,000 deduction means the government won't charge me $330. Of course, the government will give me a standard deduction of about $5,000, so the first tax deductible $5,000 I spend is a complete loss for me.

Maybe I'm crazy. But given a choice between spending money and saving money, tax deductions seem like a lousy way of saving me. Now if I'm going to spent the money anyway, a 33% sale is certainly a great deal. But 67% savings (not buying the item) is significantly better than 33%.

Anyone more familiar with taxes want to correct where I'm off here?

(Why does this come up? Well, basically I've been trying to figure out a bunch of financial decisions - 401K deductions for payroll, housing implication, how to claim deductions on taxes, and the bunch. And my general impression from talking to people is that either I'm really confused about how tax deductions work, a bunch of my acquaintances aren't very good mathematicians, are both. And it's hard to decide whether something is a good deal when one doesn't know the actual price.)

Eyes to See, Patience to Wait

Tonight I've been contemplating Psalms (probably triggered by a friend mentioning that frolicking is used in at least on Psalm). Two quick thoughts after listening to the first thirty-some of them.

First, many of them deal with waiting for God to act to relieve some dire circumstance. It occurs to me how different this theme is than the "We have victory in Christ" theme I often perceive Christians as having. I don't necessarily think that they are opposite themes (Paul, after all, talks a lot about his earthly sufferings), but I do wonder if in America we are so accustomed to instant gratification that the idea of extended suffering before God acts is anathema. It seems cruel or inhumane for God to wait to respond to the righteous in need.

The second thought relates to Psalm 37 where it says:

I was young and now I am old,
yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken
or their children begging bread.

My first reaction is "Wow, that's certainly not true today." (Yes, I know, that's not pious of me.) My second is "That can't possibly be true." And my third reaction "Wow, I have no idea if that is true or not." Here's the why behind my third thought:

• Most of our awareness of suffering comes from the media. Television and print usually capture a moment of great need, but rarely trace the suffering over an extended period. Given that God can be somewhat...slower...to act that we might like, it's hard to evaluate from a momentary picture the faithfulness of God to feed the righteous.
• While there are plenty who claim to be righteous (including Christians), God probably isn't deciding righteousness by personal declaration. So when the media reports about Joe or Jane or Susie Q in need, not only is it a momentary snapshot, but we don't know anything about their spiritual condition.
• Paul tells us that the sins of some men are obvious, while the sins of others trail behind them: It takes time to learn about a person. How many people in my life do I really know well enough to know if they have sins trailing behind them? And of those, how many have been forsaken or have children begging for food?

The Promise of Hope

So my church just wrapped up a series talking about the Bible & secrets. Toward the end of the series, we invited people to anonymously share three areas that most affected them. We have them a list of suggestions (e.g. various types of guilt, hopelessness, jealousy, financial pressure, boredom, etc.) as well as blanks for free hand responses. The church is hoping to use the feedback to help know how to better minister to people.

Lately I've looking over the responses trying to figure out how to turn hundreds of tear offs into meaningful information. It's really sobering and overwhelming to read page after page after page of the deep hurts that people are suffering.

I don't know how to sort out all of my thoughts, but here are a few:

• The last couple nights have really impressed on me how tempting it is to use wealth to buy distractions rather than facing the hurts of those around us. Facing the hurts of the multitude around us is heart breaking, and it deeply challenges my faith that the gospel is the solution. There's no good answer to the question "What if Jesus isn't enough for the hurts around me?" Perhaps giants of the faith can face the hurt without doubt, but for me with my mustard seed sized faith, it's not that easy. And rather than grieve and weep and grow, it's easier to bury my head in the sand with entertainment, or perhaps picking a less daunting goal like defeating evolution, stopping global warming, or campaign finance reform.
  
  
• We feel so alone and vulnerable, and so we don't share, and so we feel more alone and more vulnerable. Because we feel alone, we don't realize that others are also feeling alone and vulnerable, so we aren't kind and gentle with them, and so they feel more alone and more vulnerable and aren't kind or gentle with others either.
  
  
• "Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." I've been reflecting on this comment from Peter over the last week.
  
  
• I finally figured out why overseas travel doesn't strongly appeal to me: It reminds me how weak and fragile I am in the world, and I'm reminded enough of that as I try and get through my life.
  

Vent, No Duct?

So one of the vents in my room always pours out cold air. I finally got tired of it and took off the vent. Amazingly, it's just a cavity reaching into the bowels of my floor - there's no duct work, or even any evidence that there ever was any duct work. I assume there's a disconnected duct somewhere since when the furnace is on, it pushes enough air into the floor to push cold air out the vent.

But what I can't figure out is how do I end up with a vent but no duct?

My place isn't exactly new - has nobody else noticed this problem for years on end?

Or perhaps a random construction accident took out the duct work, but they just left a random vent?

Or maybe they just accidentally knocked a hole in the wall at some point and decided to cover it up with a vent? (But then how come it actually leaks cold air...?)

Values

I'm still blogging - or at least, I think I am. As a friend of mine commented recently, though, my track record doesn't back that up.

Lately I've been mired in wedding planning. Okay, it's not really that bad, and it makes me appreciate my fiancee's economical sense of decor and style. But one aspect of the planning that's been really hard for me is the question of how to design a ceremony that reflects our values.

It's great that someone is willing to sell flipclips as wedding favors at $8.99 each. (Actually as cheap as $5.99 for orders of 200+.) But cost aside, what does a flipclip add to the event? Is it decoration? Is it symbolic? Is it commemorative?

But it's been hard for me to step back from the "Wow, it's really cool that for only $0.4391736/person, we can rent a reflective doodad that also doubles as a whats-it-called." sentiment to a more comprehensive picture that encompasses questions like "What would I like our ceremony to communicate?" or "What themes would I like represented at our marriage?" or "Do I really care if we have a concrete cast of our footprints?"

Maybe that's why I've felt so frustrated by the commercialness of weddings: Everyone is very happy to sell something for the wedding, but it's hard to put a context to the detail. [Incidentally, often they don't sell it very well - I've been aghast at how many businesses need to spend $500 to buy a decent website. I understand that pricing information changes, but couldn't you at least ballpark your typical services and costs? I know that an all-text site is so 1998, but couldn't you include a few photographs of the wedding urn you want me to rent from you?]

It's like trying to write an essay. Every essay needs an organizational structure - a thesis, introduction, paragraphs with topic sentences and a conclusion. Yes, details and supporting arguments are important, but an essay isn't comprised by throwing details together. The wedding shopping process feels a lot like trying to wade through the details without a supporting structure.

And yes, developing a structure is hard without knowing the cost of various details. In advanced engineering theory, this problem is known as "Catch-22".

So far the best solution I've found so far is an iterative one:

1. Fiancee and I outline budget.
2. Fiancee and I brainstorm wedding ideas and sketch out a corresponding day. (This step keeps highlighting details like 'hrm, it might be X hours between breakfast and the reception, we'd better budget brunch for the wedding party.')
3. Fiancee and I research approximate pricing (and use the research to brainstorm more ideas).
4. Review the research. Discard unreasonable ideas ("What? The reindeer drawn sled requires snow and we're not getting married in the midwinter...")
   
5. Select affordable ideas that we like. Repeat 1-5 for remaining plans.

Improvements? What have other people done that helped them balance the budget, theme, and detail aspects of the wedding planning process?

Environmentally Friendly Diamonds

So for the few readers of my blog who for some reason or another don't get my e-mails, I'm engaged. I'm not putting the story up for public domain (yet, at least), but it's well worth asking my fiancee for a retelling if you get a chance.

Planning the proposal was fascinating test, but one of the most interesting puzzles was finding a stone for the ring. My fiancee had said she wanted a stone that she could be sure wasn't mined by enslaved children in the middle of Africa, being used to support wars, or similar environmentally harmful causes. For her, that boiled down to "no new diamond". (I know that other socially concerned friends had been comfortable with, say, Polar Bear Diamonds from Canada, but she wasn't.)

Anyway, I knew all of that when I started visiting jewelry stores and trying to get a sense for the ring market. And it was fascinating how the stores steer the shopper toward diamond rings (and very expensive rings at that). The experience is simply not designed for the socially conscious. Ask about "where are the diamonds from" or express concern about diamonds in general and one gets reassurances about certificates, but no one readily offers alternatives. There's no "Well, we offer X, Y, and Z reassurances, but if you don't trust those, we also have some diamond alternatives available. For example, are you familiar with ...?"

I learned (or reminded myself, perhaps) that I really don't like actively fighting societal norms. I'm really comfortable doing my own thing. But when I have to actively and repeatedly dialog with strangers about doing something different, especially something where they are the experts and I have minimal knowledge, I get really tired and frustrated. It's so tempting to just go along with the norm.

Likewise, I suspect it's hard for businesses to change since 99.9% of their customers expect the experience that I had - and would be deeply put off by suggestions that they consider the social impacts of their shopping.

Money, part x.ii of X

So I've been thinking a lot about money. My budget class had it's first "real" meeting this week (last week's meeting was mostly introductory). There's a lot that's been on my heart, but here's one that's really been on my mind: Why is it so hard to be content with less?

Why does my heart gravitate toward the new and expensive so easily? I want a new desk chair. My current one doesn't give me any problems - it just isn't new or shiny or spiffy. If I didn't know that I could buy a nice new chair for $80, I wouldn't consider grumbling about my current chair. But just knowing that there is "better" out there makes me start contemplating the purchase.

Can I really tell the difference between old and new entertainment? I recently invested $40 in a couple copies of Starcraft. Partly to satisfy my conscience about actually owning software I use - and partly so I can teach my significant other a bit about real time strategy games. Yes, the graphics are a bit dated. Yes, Starcraft II will probably be prettier. But you know, I don't sit there during the game going "Ug, this is so ugly." In fact, I mentally imagine a universe which is far more detailed than the actual graphics. It's only when I see the new and better (Starcraft II demos) that I realize how much has changed.

This week's memory verse is "Just as the rich rule over the poor, so the borrower is servant to the lender." I've been realizing that while I often hear a lot about helping the poor (which is great), I don't hear people talk about eliminating Visa and Mastercard. Why not? Partly, I think, it's because we don't tend to believe that debt indentures us to service. (And yes, it's possible for us to get trapped even if we're not poor.)

Here's another principle I've been wrestling with: "Do not say 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make money'". So often, credit assumes on the profitability of tomorrow - but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Money, Part x of X?

So I started taking a budgeting class, which may the first of many posts. Two thoughts caught my attention.

First, the study has very case studies of people and their financial situations after they've found themselves in difficulty. It's really tragic to see how financial decisions slowly accumulate until they are a crushing load.

Secondly, the study mentioned the verse

And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?

and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Mostly I've been thinking about in the context of work and what it means to be trustworthy with asking for equipment, new software, new LCD screens, and the like. The full passage context is here.

Post, Post!

So my friend who complained a couple weeks ago that I don't post weekly seems to have had a very valid point. Unfortunately, I don't have much interesting to say at this point. Or maybe more to the point, little of it seems to blog very well. If people are suitable bored, they are welcome to create their own blog for me with it's own fictional posts.

Anyway, one quick thought: I've been reading through Ezekiel (yes, one of the major prophets that despite being major, nobody seems to know aside from prophetic utterances about Gog and the end of the world). So far, the first thirty chapters have nothing to do with the end of the world (sorry to disappoint people), but it's striking how often God says "I will do X, and then you will know that I am God." X ranges from "wipe you out and destroy you" to "return you to the land and make the nations around you serve you", but the formula of:

God acts in a significant way, and then a group knows that he is truly God.

has me thinking about what it takes for me to evaluate my world view. What would it take for me to become, say, an open theist? Or a Calvinist? Or a Muslim?

Hypothermic Weight Loss Plan

I know I haven't blogged for a while. Partly it's exhaustion; partly it's just that I've been busy with activities that don't blog very well (e.g. met 50 new people).

Anyway, the recent drop in temperature combined with living in a place without free heat for the first time in ten years led me to this brilliant idea: I ought to publish a weight loss planned focused on freezing. If the temperature is lower, my body ought to burn more energy to keep itself warm, right? So there ought to be a point where my body is continuously burning lots of extra energy to keep itself warm, but not too cold so that I suffer from hypothermia and die.

This brilliant plan has great benefits:

• First, it is continuous and automatic. None of the hard work of getting on an exercise bike, going to the gym, or getting outside. Instead, every moment that I am at home, being a lazy couch potato, my diet plan is hard at work.
• I know it's working. None of this "hrm, I wonder if limiting myself to a syrup and lemon diet is working" doubts - the constant shivering is an automatic reminder that your body is burning energy.
• It saves on heating bills.
• Others share your misery, even if they aren't trying to loose weight.
• If you want a roommate or spouse to loose weight, no more nagging them to exercise or diet: Just drop the temperature. If one is mechanically minded, figure out how to rig the thermostat so it won't go above 62 or so.
• It's a great way to make others feel sorry for you: "Yeah, my doctor said I have to be on the hypothermia weight loss plan and I can't have the temperature above 49 degrees - can you believe it?"

I figure the plan is lousy, but I ought to be able to write a 100 page book and make millions anyway. I just need a better name for it.