Episode 96 - Work and Trust: Where is the balance?

Pray as if it depends on God, work as if it depends on you. Where is the balance?

Transcript

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk. Today, I want to talk about that balance that many of us struggle with, and that is doing our part versus trusting the Lord. But before we talk about it, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us. We, thank you for your constant provision for us, Lord. We, thank you for the ability to work and to serve others. We, thank you for our intellect. We, thank you for listening to our prayers and for answering them. We know that you have an awesome plan for us. Allow us to surrender our plan to you. Allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit, we ask all this in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So I was going to say recently, but a few months ago, I got a message from one of the listeners on Catholic money talk, and I don't, I don't get a lot of messages, and I don't go into my little database area that kind of collects that all the time. I probably have to set an alert for myself or a notification that I got a message, but I will get better at that. So please send me a message. But there's a woman who had reached out, and she said that her and her husband, they're in their late 50s. They raised a bunch of kids, they homeschooled, they lived on a modest salary, and they they, they lived frugally, and one of the challenges they've seemed to face is balancing between working I'll quote her her note here. We know how to live frugally, but we don't know the balance between working ourselves to death or insuring enough money for retirement first, trusting God, right? So that's that quote. We all struggle with this. I struggle with this. We know God has an awesome plan for us, but he also doesn't let us just, like, coast through life and like, like, he's laying track as we're as the trains coming and, you know, going to some magical place. No, there's a lot of work, and hard work, sweat, tears, blood, sweat and tears, right? Whatever that saying is that we have to do there's there's a level of participation that the Lord invites us into for his plan. So how do we balance that? And so to encourage this listener, I would say none of us know for sure, but we try to learn and we try to understand as we go through life. So so let's talk about this for a little bit, right? Trusting God with money, family and the unknown. How do we do this? Well, this past summer, I've been on a bit of a journey, a couple things that I've been praying that the Lord take care of and many times and many things, I try. I like to have a plan, and I like to understand the plan, and I love to be the one to execute the plan and to watch how the plan goes, and if it's not going according to plan, it irritates me, right? Because I know what's best. Oh, my goodness, I don't, but in my brain, sometimes I act, think, talk like I know what's best, and I don't. The Lord does. And one of my favorite stories that describes this, and I've probably shared this before, but, but this summer, we had a lot of readings, the first readings, the Old Testament readings this summer, for it was probably Sunday Mass and daily mass, but it was retelling the story of Abraham, right? In particular, I want us to think about Sarah. So here's Abraham and Sarah and and they're they're older, right? And God shows up to Abraham and says, Hey, I'm going to make you some promises. You're going to have a huge family. You're going to, you know, I'm going to create a nation that will be my people, and I'll give you a place to live, and your descendants will be as numerous as the stars and the sand and and all of that. So, big promises, big promises. But there's a problem. Abraham doesn't have a son, right? He doesn't have a son to continue his name to, you know, to have another family and create more offspring. So how is this going to start? You don't even have a son to do this. So Abraham, they trust the Lord, right? And time goes on. On. Time goes on, years go on, and they they're only getting older, right? They're only getting older, and they still don't have a son. And Sarah recognizes that, I don't say recognize, but she Sarah sees with her own eyes that she's part of the problem here, right? If she has not been able to produce an heir for Abraham, and so she decides to. She's impatient, and she thinks it's all her fault and that, I guess the Lord is waiting for her to do something. So she decides, you know what Abraham, you can have my woman servant and go make a baby, and that happens, and then Sarah gets very upset, right? And there the whole, there's a whole challenging relationship, you can read it, but the servant has a baby, and it starts to have a attitude, like she's better than Sarah, at least, that's how Sarah perceives it. So she wants to get rid of her. So Abraham says, All right, we'll get rid of her. And her child Ishmael and and they're gone, right? They're kind of banned from the family. And eventually, right, Sarah becomes pregnant when, when the angels first approach Abraham and says, Oh no, by this time next year, you know, Sarah's gonna have a baby. And Sarah's laughing like there's no way, like no way. And lo and behold, she does, right? And Isaac is born. And, and we know the whole story, right? Isaac, then has Jacob and Esau, and then Jacob has 12 kids that all become the tribes of Israel, one of them being Joseph. I've told the story recently. Joseph gets sold into slavery, into Egypt by his other I was gonna say 11 brothers, but probably 10 of them, right? The youngest one maybe wasn't part of the plot, but, but Sarah, go back to the first story I was telling. Sarah gets impatient with the Lord, takes matters into our own hands and does her own thing. Okay? And it creates a problem. It creates challenging problem, and she is out of peace because of it. Why? Because she thought it would go one way. And she started putting things in motion, and they they went sideways, right? She She was impatient, and didn't wait for the Lord. But here's the deal, the Lord still showed up and carried out the promise that He had made from the beginning, right? He was able to pull his original plan around, right? And I love saying this to myself sometimes when I feel like I've gotten too involved in something and messed it up, like Sarah was unable to create a problem that God couldn't overcome, right? So as frustrated she was with herself taking matters to her own hands, God still came through. And in my life, there's times where I take things to my hands, and I do things hoping that the thing that I want to happen, my my wish, my hope, my prayer, my goal, right? I take into like, I try to start answering my own prayers, right? Like I've got the idea I know what needs to happen here, and it goes sideways, and it gets very frustrating for me. I'll get out of peace because my plan isn't working. But when I look back and I see, despite my my effort, my poor effort, my misguided effort, the Lord still comes through. And that goes back to the scripture verse, right, Romans, 828, we know all things work together for good, for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose. And the way I think about this, when it comes to financial matters, you know, family matters, just large scale, maybe long term planning, strategic things is whatever plan we try to figure out and put in place, the Lord's still going to work his thing. And if we're prayerfully seeking the Lord and prayerfully discerning what's in front of us and trying to make decisions, and when we feel the prompt when we hear the voice of God right through the Holy Spirit talking to us and giving us direction, we need to listen right, because that's going to make our life go a lot smoother and more peacefully on a couple different reasons. One, because we're yielding to the Holy Spirit, right and when, when we are. Within the will of God. We have peace when we stand within the will of God, when we stand under the Lord, when we stand at the bottom of his cross, when we're standing under him, when we're understanding him right, stand under understand when we're there, surrendering to the Lord's will. It's so peaceful. And even if we get it slightly wrong, he's going to fix it. He's going to come through, because that's what he said. He's got awesome plans for our future. So with that perspective, we need to go forward and make decisions. So we need to do our best to trust him, but we also need to do our part. There's a quote, I think it's Saint Augustine that is credited with it, and that is, pray as though everything depended on God, right? So we pray like everything depends on God, and we should act as though everything depends on you, right? So I need to pray like everything depends on God. I need to work act like everything depends on me and and I forget which Saint this is. I could take a minute to google it, but I'll just quote it, and I'll look it up later. But someone was talking to a I think it was a saint. Maybe it was Padre Pio or something like that. And they said, How often should I pray, right? And the saint said, I'm going to make this up, because I'm not looking it up, but pray an hour every day, unless you're really busy, then pray two hours, right? And there's that balance, pray as though everything depends on God, and act work as though everything depends on you. But if we are only working so hard because we think everything we're working because everything depends on us, we need to intentionally pause to remember that it doesn't. It all depends on God, and so we need to pray more. And that's that balance, and that's what's beautiful about being in some type of faith community, whether it be a men's group, a woman's group, something through your parish, or even in your marriage, in your family, where you can help hold each other accountable to make sure that prayer is the beginning or at the start of our action, that we start with prayer. I did a whole one of my first podcast was that start with prayer was something that probably one of my most treasured things, that my my father gave me, right? And his legacy was you woke up and you said, Good morning to Jesus, and you start everything with a prayer. Why? Because we want to pray like everything depends on God and and then we can work like everything depends on us. So that's kind of the spiritual lens, right, the perspective that we want to have, right? Catholic money talk. That's what we're trying to do. We look at financial decisions, we look at, you know, particular practical situations, and we say, Look, everyone in the world, so many people, well, in the US, right, where we are, might be faced with these same situations or same decisions to make, and at the end of the day, we might make the same decision. We might come up with the same path forward that someone who's not Catholic comes up with, someone who's not Christian comes up with, but we should have done it a different way, right for us, in particular in today's conversation, it's because we're going to be praying like it depends on God and using that as the lens to make our decisions. So when I go back to my listeners question, one of the other things she said in there, so like, how do we make sure we're not working ourselves to death, but we're saving enough and we're trusting God. But one of the things she said, which was interesting to me, she said, we're investing a lot now, but don't know if it will be enough in the world's eyes. And when I first read that, I went, Oh man, like, yeah, it probably wouldn't be. But in reality, we don't. We don't care about that, like we don't care how we're doing in the world's eyes. Or at least, we shouldn't, right? Because at the end of our life, there's only one there's one judge, one just judge who loves us so much, who came and died for us, we only care about what he thinks and when we make decisions, only caring about what the Lord thinks, right, and that's through our well formed conscience, through our dialog with our spouse, through prayer when it comes to. Decision making when we only care what the Lord thinks he's going to help us out. Now, about a year ago, I'm going to tell just a quick story about trusting God and listening. About a year ago, friends of ours, they went through a challenging moment, and and we were very aware of it, and we were praying for them. And in my mind, I like to try to do things and fix things. And I was thinking, What could we possibly do? Is there anything we could do for these people? And we're just praying and praying and praying, and Taryn calls me up. I remember I just met with a friend, and I'm driving out of Panera, and I'm driving and Taryn calls me. I say, Hey, honey, what's up? She says, you know, I've been thinking and praying for this family. I said, Yeah, me too. She said, I think, I think we need to write them a check. I was like, What do you mean? She goes, Well, I I know for sure there's an expense related to what they're going through, and I think we should give them a gift. And immediately, I thought, immediately, when she said this to me, I thought of a number, and I thought she was right. What she said resonated with me, and I thought of a number. I said, What are you thinking? She said, I don't want to tell you how much, because I I want you to pray about it and see if you come up with the same number I came up with, I said, Taryn, there's a number in my head right now. As soon as you said to me, it popped in my head. What are you thinking? And just she said, the amount that was in my head. And immediately confirmed to me that the Lord put that number there. And I even said to Taryn, I said, Taryn, if we do this, they're going to think we're weird. We don't have money like this. And why am I saying that? Well, we were saving money for we got to replace some cars. We're trying to pay off our house. We're also behind, quote, unquote, in retirement, as the world sees it, right? It's something we keep saving for every month, but not as much as you know, the experts I'm doing air quotes here might tell us to do, but it's a number that we feel comfortable with and that in our prayerful budget we've created, but, but this, this this amount of money that was going to put a hiccup in our plan. But I have learned that when I hear a word from the Lord, a sense from the Lord to just do it, he won't let us down. He won't let us down. So we got a card, we wrote a letter, we wrote a check. We stopped by their house. They weren't home, so we just left it there, and then we didn't hear anything. And I would look at the bank account and see, did they cash the check? And it was a weird feeling. One, it was, did, did? Like, did we overstep? Like, who are we to think that we can help someone else solve a problem. You know, I'm thinking of what, what their perspective is of us. Our perspective was we felt the Lord tell us to do something, and so we did it, and like it's not on us how someone else receives or perceives what we did, if we're confident that that's what the Lord called us to do? Well, it was probably two weeks later I saw the check, cleared the bank account. I thought, wow, they did. They accepted it. And then the next day, we're at Mass on Sunday. And this couple, they don't normally come to our parish, but they were a couple rows behind us, and when I turned and saw them, they gave us a hug, and they said, Thank you, and they told us that it was the exact amount of an expense that they had incurred with their situation. And I mean, there is nothing that kind of confirms what the Lord told you to do and then you acted on it, and you get that kind of response. That's just the Lord saying, like, that's what I that's exactly what I need you to do, like, and I just felt the biggest encouragement that like, thank God, because sometimes you go through life and you do things and you just don't know what's going to happen, right? Maybe you see someone, you offer to pray over them, and you're like, man, is this just the Lord making me feel like I'm crazy? And, yeah. You pray over them, and you don't know how it's going to end. You might not, they might just be crying, you know, and you just, you just don't know. But when you're able to kind of receive that feedback, right? I've talked about this before, I think with when I had Dr Justin Anderson on when we do things for people, or we do things in life, we're longing for some confirmation that that was the right thing to do, because that's what we're created for to that when we die and we stand before the Lord, he says, Welcome home, good and faithful servant, right? It's another word for you did good, you did a good job. And that's what we're all trying to do. If we're trying to get to heaven, we're trying to do a good job. And and so here's the cool thing, a few months ago, right? I'm looking at the calendar here. Three and a half months ago, I put out on the podcast, Taryn and I, we paid off our mortgage like, what the heck? The math didn't work on that. If we gave someone that we hadn't planned on giving some type of financial gift, how the heck do we still pay off the mortgage? Well, because the Lord finds a way to do whatever he wants done, and if you cooperate with them, you get to participate in that plan. You're not just like a bystander, collateral damage. Sometimes it can feel like that, especially when we go through a trying or difficult situation, it can feel like this is there's no way this is going to work out. Like this can't be part of God's plan, and maybe we haven't been making the right decisions to fully and peacefully participate in his plan. But at any moment, we can start doing that, and we could say, Lord, You know what I'm dealing with right now. What do you have in this for me? What do you have in this for me, Lord, I'm trusting you. Just tell me what's next. And so that's the biggest thing, right? That this listener was asking me, like, how do we balance that trusting God but also doing our part? It means we're just constantly pursuing him, constantly, not just an hour a week when we go to church on Sunday, but throughout our day. In any moment, it could be a tough work situation, it could be a tough situation or conversation we need to have with someone in our family, maybe it's our spouse or a child or a parent, and in that moment, you just say, Lord, give me the words to speak, give me the ears to listen to this person. Let me be able to share your love with them. And I tell you, if you go through life and all you want to do and all you try to do in every moment is to share the love of God with the people around you, your life's going to be awesome, and God's going to take great care of you, but you still got to do your part, right? You still got to wake up, still got to go to work. You still got to feed your family, go shopping, clean the house, pay the bills, cut the grass like you know, repair dealing with the home, repair, repair the water leak in the ceiling. You just got to keep doing what you're doing. The Lord, he'll take care of you, because that's what he does. He said he would pray, and we're going to pray like we like everything depends on God, and we're going to work like everything depends on us. And when we're too busy to pray, we're going to pray twice as long, right? Those are the things we're going to do. But here's the other thing, and I want to bring this back around to what the listener said about you know, we're not saving enough in the world's eyes. Well, is it the world's eyes, or is it what we think other people are expecting of us, or what other people have done that they think we should be doing, or things that we see other people do that we think we should also do, and that is, I would say, guarding our heart from jealousy and regret. So if you've lived any amount of time on Earth, there's probably been moments in your life where you wished you had something that someone else had. And if you're listening to this and you're like, four or five years old, yet, like that toy that other kid had at the daycare or the growth group or the mom and me group, or whatever, right that desire, you see something that someone else has, you want it as you get older. I mean, that's easy. That could be a job, it could be a house, it could be just a financial situation, right? You see something that someone else has, you go, man, that'd be really nice. Maybe it was a vacation, a car, whatever, right? Some, some gift, talent, skill. It's easy to kind. Get sucked into that, right? Oh, man, that looks really good. I wish I had that. And the other thing is regret to think, oh man, I wish I had never done XYZ. Wish I had never bought this. I wish I had saved for that. I wish I had not saved, and I wish I had bought at that time, right? And when I'm seeing that a lot with home prices, particularly in New Jersey and people. Some people thinking, man, we should have, we should have bought a house three years ago. Why? Why are we waiting? But if they were prayerful in the decision at the time and confident in it, then just stick with it. The Lord, he'll take care of you. He will take care of you. He is faithful. He promises to so we don't want to allow our thoughts of jealousy or regret to get in the way if we think, well, in the world view, we should have a bigger house we have so many kids, or we shouldn't have so many kids. Other people are going to think we're crazy. Or we should be saving more money for retirement than we currently are. Or we should have spent more money on our child's wedding than we did. Or we should have allowed our school kid to go to that school because it's more prestigious, even though it costs more, they would get student loans, on and on and on and on and on. If you worry about what the world thinks, or what the people around you think, or you're you're creating some type of, you know, keeping up with the Joneses mentality in your head, you're going to get exhausted and you're not going to be peaceful. You'll drive yourself nuts, and you have to be content with what you have. With contentment comes so much peace and joy. I have a whole episode on contentment, and he's even as I'm talking about I'm going to look it up because episode 31 it's on contentment. Episode Five, the importance of prayer. I was talking about that earlier. So those are your two other ones. You can actually listen to this. Go and listen to episode five and episode 31 but contentment will keep us from regret or jealousy, right? Contentment is allowing us to be satisfied with our current situation, knowing that we're trying to get to heaven, right? So, so if we're not perfectly happy, right? Which is different than joyful? Happy is different than joyful. Happy is fleeting. Joyful is the concrete, okay? But if we're not perfectly happy, that that's probably appropriate and pretty obvious to most of us, because we're not in heaven, nothing. It's not gonna be perfect till we're in heaven, but we can be content and have great peace and be satisfied with our current situation, because we know this is where the Lord's kind of put us at this moment, and then we can just serve and love those people around us. All right. So, so we need to do our best. We need to trust the Lord. We're going to do our best, and then we trust the Lord to do the rest. We're going to leave space for the Lord to show up in our story. Turn my story. When we acted on what he told us to do, and it didn't take away from our our plans or goals or what we were striving towards. We still got there, but we need to pray and we need to listen, because he does have a plan, and he's constantly inviting us to participate in it. And then we need to guard our hearts from jealousy and from regret. Again, Romans, 828, we know all things work together for good, for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose, and that's even when life hasn't gone as we thought it should. Because God can use anything, and he can weave it into good. So I ask you, what does trusting God look like for you right now, in your finances, maybe in your health, in your family, whatever situation you might be, what does trusting God look like for you right now and then? Where do you need to do your best? Where do you need to apply a little more effort. Where do you feel Lord's calling you to work a little harder and do that and then and then watch him do the rest. And those places that you feel like you're spinning the wheels, just surrender them to the Lord. I've done that recently with a with a situation I just. I told the Lord, Lord, I'm done trying to fix this. I'm done. You do it. And I did it, not in in it. I did it in a prayerful manner, not like a fed up matter. You know what? Lord, I'm just done. I'm done. But I said, Lord, I'm done trying to orchestrate this in humility, I give it to you, Lord, please take care of it because I can't. So in life, that's that's the approach we want to take. That's our balance between doing our best and working hard and then trusting God, right? But the only way that works is when those two things get combined together, when they complement each other, because we pray, we listen. So you might have some hopes and dreams out there that maybe you feel like the Lord wants to do for you, and you just can't figure out how to do it. Well, you can laugh a little like Sarah did at the impossibility, but believe that God still fulfills His promises. You might just need to be patient. You might need to wait a little bit longer. So as we close today, as I wrap up, this is this is a full take here. I invite us to pray for peace, contentment, trusting the Lord. So let's pray for that right now, name of the Father and of the Son, the Holy Spirit, amen, Lord, we thank you for your faithfulness to us, your constant care for us in our lives. Lord, allow us to be content in the situations that we find ourselves in. Lord, give us great peace. Show us where we need to act and allow us to trust you more, Lord, God, give us a hint. Lord, a loud hint. When you invite us to to participate in your plan to act. Lord God, show us our part so that we can do our part in great trust that you will bring it all to fruition. Give us great peace as we follow you. We ask this in Jesus name, amen, the name of the Father Son, Holy Spirit, amen. Well, hopefully this was helpful. In particular, the listener that sent me that note. I hope this, this helps, and it's, it's not a clean answer, like, what, what's, what's the amount of money that God wants you to have saved for retirement that I don't have that. But hopefully the perspective is, Lord, we've surrendered our life to you. We've raised kids in the faith. Help them form good consciences and good minds. We've let them go. We can't control them, Lord, hopefully they pursue you. We pray that they pursue you, Lord, God and just bless us. You will not forsake us, Lord. So hopefully that perspective can help you today. And I just want to encourage you and say the Lord is very, very happy with you. You bring him such great joy. So as you, as you face, the decisions that this world, you know, the questions it throws on us. Where do you want to live in retirement? What do you want to do in retirement? Where are you gonna, you know, are you gonna be able to retire or work, or what we're just say, Lord, where are you calling us? Are we just gonna stop working, play golf, retire, on a beach, travel, or is there a new moment that you're going to call us to? Because I'm sure there's a new moment he's going to call you to, and he will provide a way. He will provide a way. You just have to be in pursuit of him. Thank you Jesus for your faithfulness, Come Holy Spirit. Well, I hope this has been helpful. Please feel free to share this episode with any any friends or anyone your family that you think could benefit from it. And again, please, if you've got a topic or a question you'd love to, I guess, hear my take on it. Praise the Lord. Feel free to click the link in the podcast. It is, get in touch with Paul, just click it in the episode description, and I will get an email, and I will find a way to turn on notifications for that. So I'm not weeks or months behind responding to people, but I hope to hear from you. Thank. For listening, God bless Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You