Article #5 – Resources
Time, talent, and treasure make up the content for this rest area of your soul roadmap. In this article we will be emphasizing the treasure/ money component.
We all live, work, and play surrounded by an economic system few completely understand. Capitalism now dominates the global system of economic RESOURCES. When the United States borrows money it issues bonds which are purchased by banks, insurance companies, mutual funds and the like. The person in charge of the money for the largest nation on earth commented in public on October 12, 2022, that she was worried about the adequate cash in the United States bond market. Now wait just a minute, the Secretary of the Treasury said that, and in public? When leaders worry about the machinery designed to make the entire system work, we should all pause……There is something larger going on here.
The larger is smaller.
This rest area rests in the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. If the Treasure Secretary of the United States is worried, shouldn’t I be too? Nope. I can’t control international political economic policy making. But I can manage my own RESOURCES.
I get an electronic message every day when I power up my computer. It is a time management message to prioritize my activities for the day. I work on the things that I can control. What system do you use to manage your twenty-four seven life? Control what you can. I subscribe to the idea of permanent continuous learning. It is a grinding away process, refining the raw talent material God gave me into finished goods. How do you refine yourself? You are empowered to continue to learn new talent and to refine skills like no time in history. This includes financial management. In my former vocation I managed a financial advisory firm. We operated on the principle of family for profit. We worked since 1977 successfully paddling a canoe upstream against the current of our current culture which operates on the principle of continuous deficits. We operated and served a small community on the idea that at the end of a measurement period, regardless of what period is used, there should be some profit. It is money left over from all the activities of work and daily life. Consistently earning or creating some measure of profit and then setting some of it aside is paddling up the stream of the current. It is controlling what we can control. It is being a good steward of our RESOURCES. It is also powerful.
So much of our systems today seem to be designed today to erode our RESOURCES making it more difficult to succeed. Do you feel the crunch of time? The atrophy of talent? Is it a certainly challenging to operate within the system of capitalism? Each visit to this rest area of RESOURCES is written to encourage you to control the RESOURCES available to optimize your possibilities for progress. This rest area of your soul roadmap brings our 45 years of counter cultural, contrarian, ideals into practical application. Each article is like setting another paver into your soul road. You are building something to drive your life upon—and potentially for the next generations as well. Our former professional work brings a lifetime of practical encouragement and peaceful progress to this rest area. We have found it to be progressively easier to paddle up stream over time. But we need to start someplace. Tap the first paver into place come on along with all of us to building your soul road.