The Cost

This week my church began a message series entitled the Blessed Life. No pun intended on the word “entitled” there, it just fell into place and we I recognized it, I decided to leave it and classify it as “Divine Inspiration”.

Pastor Todd talked about a statistic that showed over 1 billion people on the planet live on less than $1 a day. The smallest coffee size at Starbucks is an 8oz called a “Short” and a short black coffee costs $1.85 or two days income for 1/7 of the earth’s population.

I heard a conversation in the church office about new taxes in the new year. Suffice to say that the talk was neither happy nor positive in nature. (That unstable feeling under your feet is me turning the conversation…) Don’t get me wrong here, I do not relish the idea of paying higher taxes, but honestly, things could be so much worse than they are if I had been born a few lines of latitude to the south or a fistful of degrees of longitude to the west… I am truly blessed. If you are reading this, regardless of what your current situation is, you are most likely using some sort of electronic device that puts you statistically into the very top echelon of the world’s economic strata. We are blessed!

(Another shift of the feet here, but trust me, I’ll put a bow on it soon…)

When I was released from jail 15 years ago I was required to attend about three years of counseling. One of the exercises that we did was to tabulate the cost of our addictions. Not just the raw dollar amount spent on our vices, although that number can be staggering in and of itself. Our exploration of the cost cast a much wider net. We looked at the prevailing wage and included missed work into the tally. We “paid” ourselves for the time spent planning our criminal activity. We took into account lost wages due to incarceration and not being able to work in our previous field due to our diminished legal status. The number grew from a vaguely large amount to a figure that was just staggering for pretty much everyone in the group. The cost of my struggles could provide so much for so many, yet I remained in my selfish world for years.

It’s time for us to look beyond the “offenses” of finances that we get so infuriated at in our sphere’s of living and turn our focus on the blessings, because we are all blessed beyond comprehension. So when you see the hashtag #RCABlessed in my posts on social media this week you will know what I mean.

-Rise Up!!!