posted by Sarabeth Jones
If you were in church yesterday you heard a great message about money. At the end, Craig directed us to find a little green card and gave us these instructions:
This week, whenever you handle money, let this verse be a reminder that you want God to be involved in every area of your life.
Hebrews 13:5
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.”Put the verse in your wallet, near your debit card or cash or whatever you use to spend $$.
If you didn’t get a card – just make your own! We’d love to hear if seeing this verse every time you go to spend money has changed any decisions you’ve made this week. Or, if it helped you memorize the verse.
Craig’s sermon also reminded me of this breakdown of the world’s resources that I blogged about earlier this year. It’s shocking to see how much of the world’s resources we really use:
If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this;
The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white; 18 white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving – and attempting to live on – only 3% of the income of “the village.”