A while ago STATUS was slated to have a guest speaker talk about being the 'hands of Christ.' But when the day arrived for her to speak she came down with a cold or a stomach virus or the bird flu (my memory is a little fuzzy on that detail) and the leadership had to throw together an emergency service in a matter of a few hours. What resulted was one of the most amazing, memorable nights I have ever had at STATUS (and that's saying a lot — there have been many).
Everyone was handed a Post-It® note at the door and asked to write their most pressing need on it and stick it to the wall. After we all finished plastering our gear on the walls of the auditorium, we returned to the perimeter to pull down a need we felt we could meet.
Reading over the hundreds of notes, I was made aware for the first time just how badly twentysomethings are consumed with debt. Student loans, car payments, credit card balances that are out of control… There didn't seem to be a single form of debt that wasn't scattered across the sea of yellow stick-ums that night.
When I studied these chapters of Genesis, I was taken back to that night at STATUS, when I stood in front of the wall and, scanning in all directions, my eyes could not escape the pleas for help getting out of debt.
It's no wonder I couldn't even get through the first book of the Bible without the entire nation of Egypt being indebted to the Pharaoh. Their culture was saturated with financial obligation, yet somehow the people were happy to become slaves to Pharaoh as long as they were continually given more (Gen 47:25). And after the provisions were enough to sustain their lives, one-fifth of everything they reaped at harvest time was immediately owed back to the creditors (Gen 47:24). Is this sounding familiar?
This is so much a picture of how debt happens. You go to work with the mindset that your yearly salary is how much you have to spend during a year's time and you begin to base your lifestyle off of that figure. This is exactly what the Egyptians did. And it works out quite well until you have a famine of your own, a period of time when money has to be diverted to an unexpected expense (a homemade milkshake gone bad, for example) or a period of time when you can't seem to find a job no matter which rug you look under.
Joseph knew better, but only because God sent a message through the Pharaoh's dream warning of the impending famine. Rarely do we get such advance notice (and even when we do, who is willing to listen)?
Avoidance of debt starts with living our lives as if we know a famine is upon us. But we quickly realize (or at least I have) that such a mindset is unnatural to us; we are programmed to be extremely short-sighted, moving from one quick fix to the next, and long-term vision hardly has an affect on our everyday habits. We don't have the attention span for it!
Imagine how crazy Joseph's servants must have thought him when they got to the point where the stockpiles could not be counted (Gen 41:49). They must have been itching to sell it off for the immediate return.
The Egyptians obviously lived paycheck to paycheck (erm… harvest to harvest). As soon as the famine began they were at Joseph's doorstep begging for provisions.
I am just now entering the period of my life where I can choose to live within a modest budget and put a bit into the 'storehouses' each pay period, or I can live at maximum capacity and cross my fingers in hopes that a famine won't strike. (Words cannot express how thankful I am that I have that choice to make.) But as God allows my 'storehouses' to increase, I must not forget the other message that this passage of scripture has for us: Joseph's careful preparation resulted in provision for not only himself but for those who were in need.