What I Still Haven't Figured Out About Money

There is a category of article I have been avoiding, and I want to write it now while the cowardice is fresh enough to name.

Most of what I publish here is written from some kind of position. Even when I am working through something uncertain, the piece lands on a point. That is the shape of a good article. Set up the problem, walk through it, arrive somewhere. A reader can leave with something they did not have when they started.

This is not that article.

I am going to spend the next couple of thousand words telling you what I still have not figured out about money. Not because I think confusion is a virtue. I do not. But because I have been writing a personal finance site for a while now, and if the pastoral voice here ever starts to sound like a man who has already arrived, I will have failed both the reader and the thing I actually believe about the Christian life.

I have not arrived. I am still in the room with you.

So here is the honest list.

I Do Not Know How God Is Going to Use the Rest of What He Has Given Me

I went to school for financial services. I have a mutual funds licence and a life insurance licence sitting quietly in a drawer because I did not end up working as a broker. Ministry called louder. And it has been the right call - I love what I do, I love the church I serve, I would not trade it.

But I also have skills. I know how to think about money. I know how to build a spreadsheet that actually helps a couple see where they are. I can read a tax return without looking things up. I know my way around a TFSA room calculation. These skills do not go away just because I took a different job. And the question I have not answered - not really, not in a way I am satisfied with - is what God wants me to do with the rest of them.

This website is a partial answer. It is a way for those skills to serve people I will never meet. Fine. Good. But it is also a commercial venture, and that complicates the answer rather than solving it. I am a pastor who operates a site that over time could generate income. I have not yet fully reconciled whether that is faithful stewardship of my non-pastoral gifts or something closer to hedging. I am honestly not sure.

Most of the books on vocation assume you have one calling and pursue it whole-heartedly. I think I have two, and I do not yet know what proportion I am supposed to give each one.

I Have Not Figured Out Why My Wife Still Has to Work

She does not have to in the sense of survival. We would eat. But our household budget is built around two incomes, and the space we would need to live on one of them has not opened up yet.

I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of thing that can be misread. My wife's work is good work. She is good at it. She is called to it in a way I can see clearly. I am not writing this because I think women belong at home - I do not - or because I wish she would stop working. But there is a specific tension in how I carry this that I have not made peace with.

I think, sometimes, that a better version of me would have figured out how to make up the difference. I have all these ideas. I have this site. I have the licences and the training. I have the time on weekends and the late evenings when I could be building something that adds enough to our household that she could choose her hours with more freedom. I have not done it yet.

Maybe that is fine. Maybe the version of provision I am picturing is itself a kind of idol, and God is doing something more ordinary and more faithful through our two incomes than I am giving Him credit for. Maybe I am supposed to keep trying. Maybe I am supposed to stop trying. I genuinely do not know.

I Do Not Yet Know How to Teach My Son About Money

I have a toddler. He is too young for any of this to matter yet. But he will not be too young forever, and I have read maybe fifteen books on raising children who handle money well, and I still do not know what I am going to actually do when the time comes.

The books tell me to let him earn an allowance tied to effort, or to give him a set amount and teach him to divide it three ways (give, save, spend), or to introduce compound interest through a matching program at home, or to never use money as a punishment, or to use it as a teaching tool in narrow and specific circumstances. They all sound reasonable. They all say slightly different things.

I am going to pick something. I am going to do it imperfectly. I am going to discover in about eight years that the approach I chose had a weakness I did not see, and I will have to course-correct. I know this abstractly. That does not make the first decision any easier.

I Do Not Know the Right Balance Between Home Projects and Saving

We own our home. The basement needs work. The kitchen is fine but not forever. There is a list of things that could be done and a list of things that should be done, and they do not overlap as completely as I wish they did.

Every dollar that goes into a home project is a dollar that is not going into the TFSA. Every dollar into the TFSA is a dollar that does not fix the thing in the basement that has been bothering my wife for two years. There is a version of me who defers all home projects indefinitely in the name of long-term wealth building, and that version of me is making his wife's kitchen experience worse for the next ten years in exchange for a spreadsheet number I will not enjoy any more than I enjoy the kitchen.

There is another version of me who renovates now and saves later, and that version is likely trading short-term pleasure for long-term financial fragility.

The honest answer is somewhere between the two, and the honest answer changes year by year depending on what else is happening in our lives. I have not yet built a formula that feels right. I suspect I never will, and that the process of weighing it each year is itself part of what stewardship looks like.

I Have Not Figured Out How to Be Okay With Full-Time Ministry and Side Work at the Same Time

This one is the hardest.

I am a pastor. Full-time. The church pays me to shepherd people, to teach, to pray, to sit with men in hard moments, to prepare and deliver sermons, to be present when presence is what is needed. I believe in this work. I believe the church deserves a pastor who brings his full attention.

And also - I am writing this at ten o'clock on a weeknight while my son is asleep and my inbox still has a few things in it from earlier today, because the site needs an article and this is the window I have. Which means part of my mental energy, every single day, is going somewhere other than the church.

I do not know how to reconcile that. There are ways to read it that feel fine. Many pastors have had side vocations historically. Paul made tents. A finance site that serves Christian men is arguably an extension of pastoral work rather than a departure from it. There are ways to read it that feel less fine. Am I giving the church what it deserves? Would a pastor with my level of outside work ever be hired in the first place, knowing what I know now?

I have not resolved this. I am writing about it because unresolved does not mean paralysed. I am doing the work. I am also still holding the question.

What I Pray When the Questions Outnumber the Answers

You may have noticed that everything above is still a live wrestling match. I want to be honest about why I keep the wrestling from collapsing into anxiety.

I pray, fairly often, for my relationship with money specifically. Not "God, bless our finances." More specifically, these five lines, in more or less these words:

Let money never become an idol. Remind me often how blessed I am to be able to afford just the basics. Give the family I lead a right mind and a right heart toward money and possessions. Bless the things I do that are good and close the doors on the things that are not. Keep me connected to the vine for ongoing wisdom.

That last one is the one I come back to most. John 15. The vine and the branches. "Apart from me you can do nothing." Not apart from me your finances will be sub-optimal. Nothing. The wisdom I need for the questions I have not yet answered is not a formula I am going to find in a book. It is the ongoing, daily connection to Christ in which the answers emerge as needed, when needed, in the specific moment they are needed.

That is what I have. It is not a plan. It is a posture.

Why I Am Telling You This

If you have read any of my writing, you may have assumed I have answers to the questions I am asking you to think about. I do not, not completely. I am a pastor working through money alongside the men I write for, not a financial expert who descended from a mountain with tablets.

This is good news, actually. The Christian life was never meant to be a matter of arriving. It is a matter of staying connected to the vine while the branch is being pruned and grown. A pastor with all the answers is a pastor who stopped listening a few years ago.

So when I write an article about getting out of debt, or investing your TFSA, or having a hard money conversation with your wife, understand what you are reading. I am writing as a man still in the room. Some of the practices I recommend are ones I have done and can vouch for. Some are ones I am working on myself. All of them exist in the same field - real Christian stewardship, lived under ongoing pressure, figured out one week at a time by ordinary men connected to Christ and to each other.

The work is not about having arrived. It is about continuing to pray the five-line prayer at ten o'clock on a weeknight when the questions are louder than the answers.

Let it never become an idol. Remind me how blessed I am. Bless what is good and close what is not. Keep me connected to the vine.

That is what I have figured out about money.

The rest of it, I am still figuring out.

With you.