Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
Hebrews 13:5 (NIV)
The Fear Under the Money
Not long after the surgery a school bus driver was back on her morning route, sore under the shoulder belt, taking the corners slower than she used to. The district gives her nothing for a day she is not on the route, and she had used up what she had. She said later that she could not afford to find out how far down the bottom goes.
Hebrews closes with instructions laid end to end: welcome strangers, remember the people in prison, keep marriage honest, keep your lives free from the love of money. Under that last one the writer sets something God had already said. Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you. He quotes it and adds nothing of his own.
The bet under the money is a reasonable one. Money does hold off a certain amount of trouble, and the part of her surgery the insurance called her responsibility came to more than four months of her rent. The part that makes money worth loving reaches further than that, the belief that with enough of it behind you, nothing can ever leave you with nothing. I have caught myself hoping for exactly that, and never once putting it in a sentence. The fear underneath it has as much to do with being alone as with being poor, and God answered it by naming who stays.
Faithful people run out of money, and Hebrews says these same readers watched their property carried off. The writer doesn’t pretend that never happened to them. He offers them company, from someone who has kept his word before.
The line he gives them to say back is, The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. People repeat a line like that to each other when they are actually using it. What would you have to set down before you could say that one?
A Prayer to Remember
God, thank you for staying through years when I gave you no attention at all. You stayed with no help from me. I keep money against a day I can’t name, and it has never done for me what you did in those years.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
