Money, honey.

I grew up without very much of it. It was the 1980s, and that was really an excellent era to grow up broke. We had nothing and we didn’t know it. We had a dam on the Calapoolia River nearby, see, and we could go swimming there. And we didn’t have the internet. It really was a different time.

I was young. I didn’t know what kind of need for money was coming for me. I didn’t know that I would need money so badly for the basics of living—like food and gasoline and Blackwing pencils. I didn’t know how badly I would need money to survive.

And I didn’t know that the very material wealth necessary for human flourishing is, in higher doses, often lethal to our souls.

It’s easy not to be obsessed with money when you have plenty of it. When your storehouse is full. It’s easy not to be worried or preoccupied with money when there’s enough of it that you don’t actively notice it coming and going.

Our values are informed by our Lived Experiences. In every case? I think so. I’m not an expert, but I believe our Lived Experiences are the primary drivers behind the setting of our Values. How and where we grew up. Your cousin who died when you were teenagers. That one time your boss yelled at you. Your dad praying for you every night of your childhood.

So while “Wealth” is a card that feels easy for some people to discard, for me, Wealth is uniquely important.

My parents’ generation had wealth or didn’t. And frustratingly, the ones who did... did not seem to communicate a lot of the “juice” to the ones who didn’t. How’d you do it? Your company worked! Your investments paid off. Why them and not us, I wonder? I think perhaps it’s always this way, in every generation. The reasons aren’t tidy enough to explain.

I didn’t understand the scale of wealth until I left the country.

When I was fifteen years old, I visited a rural Philippine community as an “evangelist.” The community didn’t see me coming. I laughed, I cried. I prayed for people with words I didn’t understand, and I developed a new understanding of poverty. I was able to interact with people living on the margins of that society, and it shifted how I saw myself in relation to my own. Why us and not them, I wonder?

Upon my return to the rural Oregon community in which I grew up, I decided that, in fact, I was the victim of an embarrassment of riches. An essentially unlocked spending limit at Goodwill when we visited once a month. All of the home-grown beef I could contain within my growing frame. Friends, family, roofs.

In the end, I waffle still. I might be rich. I don’t even know anymore. I am unable to calculate my riches.

Still, I have known the sting of poverty, of not enough. Sometimes I fear a future with not enough. It seems so globally, statistically possible.

May we all be rich! Wealth, in the context of the card sorting exercise, is defined by cash money and material possessions. But we know better. We know that our wealth can be calculated in terms of the love my daughter feels for me.

The letter I received from her on my birthday this year said, among other things: “I will never leave you alone.”

I cannot calculate my riches.

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