The Weight
It happens regularly. The phone rang and it was a client on the other end. “I’m scared about what’s going on, I can’t see the market coming back from this…recent political change that is currently in the news”. The feelings are real, the uncertainty, the fear of the unknown, the fear of loss. It all seems heavy and real, a weight on your shoulders.
We see it often in what we do, dealing with people’s nest eggs as they put money into them, or worse, are living off of them. It is a natural tendency to feel a loss of something you have more acutely than feeling the missed opportunity costs of missed potential. There is a simple illustration of this principle using some cash and a coin toss.
Game 1: You toss a coin. If it lands on tails, you gain nothing. If it lands on heads, you win $200.
Game 2: I give you $100. You toss a coin. If it lands on heads, you win $100 more, for a total of $200. If it lands on tails, you lose $100, leaving you with nothing.
Look closely and you'll notice something: both games leave you in the exact same place. Walk away with nothing or walk away with $200. The odds are identical; the outcomes are identical. Mathematically, there is no difference between the two games at all. And yet, most people will happily play Game 1. Ask those same people to play Game 2, and they hesitate, or refuse outright. Why? Because in Game 2, that first $100 felt like it was already yours. The moment it landed in your hand, something in you claimed it. So, when the coin comes up tails, you're not just missing out on a gain. You're losing something you already called your own. That's the trick our minds play on us. The pain of a perceived loss is not measured against what could have been. It's measured against what we already believed we owned.
What if we flipped that concept on its head? What if we looked at everything we owned as not belonging to us but only being held loosely and cared for until the rightful owner asks for us to use it? The Bible talks about this in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30. The master entrusted his wealth to three servants, and we see different methods that the servants used to take care of that wealth. The servant that was afraid, that had that loss aversion, was the servant that was ultimately stripped of all that he had and was cast out.
Now does that mean that we need to be reckless and invest our resources in risky ways because it is not ours but God’s? That’s not the lesson here and most of the rest of Scripture would contradict that as well. We are to be good stewards. We don’t see an example in the Parable of the Talents of what would have happened had one of the servants invested recklessly and lost their entrusted funds. We have a clue, however, as we see that the fearful servant knew his master was a hard man and therefore the servant knew there was some risk in squandering that which was entrusted to him.
That said, if we take these principles into our own lives today, I think we will find that most of our fear or anxiety over losing the resources we have saved over time, comes not from a fear of how the Lord will react to our decisions but rather a fear about whether we will have enough to “take care of ourselves”. We are not worried as much about squandering what the Lord has provided us and having to face His wrath, but instead we are worried that we will make a decision that causes us to not have “enough” to take care of ourselves. That language is revealing in that Matthew 6 tells us not to worry about taking care of ourselves but that the Lord will take care of us. It seems a contradiction in that we are to be wise and steward what the Lord gives us but at the same time hold it loosely, use it faithfully and put that capital to work.
We are called to do the best we can to grow and nurture what the Lord has given us, both in finances and in our natural gifting and talents. But we are also called to hold everything we have loosely so that we do not grab hold and resist when the Lord asks us to give out of the abundance (and sometimes the scarcity) that He has given us. Like many things in the Christian faith, it is the tension between faith and works. We sometimes have faith that God will provide and struggle with the action of letting it go and not hoarding what we have. One often strengthens the other. If you live in true faith then the actions will come, if you find yourself lacking faith, then step out in action anyway and God will prove true to Himself and grow your faith as a result.
What is it that drives you? When you feel anxious or uneasy due to a political or economic issue, focus on the reason behind it. Would reframing your view of what you own (or don’t own) help take some of that weight off your shoulders? Next week we’ll explore The Illusion that we can make it, we can have “enough” and get “there”. Wherever “there” is.
