I got a call at 7am last Tuesday from one of my business partners. At the time, I was luxuriating on the couch at a Starbucks in Ormond Beach, Fla., surfing on the Death Star, and enjoying the Frank Sinatra track that was playing. I was singing in the rain when the unexpected call came in.
"Did you get the email last night?" he asked. I hadn't and I told him so. He and another of my partners were being called into the corporate office. Apparently a reorganization is underway. Later in the day we learned that one of our inside guys was let go. I hate to sound dramatic, but for some in our organization, a panic had erupted.
It's pretty hard to focus, to go about your everyday tasks and responsibilities, when such a cloud is looming. I sure wish I could remember which recently read book gave this advice, a reminder here that nothing I write is original, but the best thing to do in such a situation is to consider the worst case scenario. That would be losing my job. I expect some of you have already experienced that reality at some point in your career.
OK, then what. Well, I could choose to spend my savings to maintain my standard of living, or I could radically downsize. I liked the latter option. Though it's not a good time to be job hunting, I have enough skills that I could find something to generate income. I won't bore you with all the potentialities in my life that would have to be considered if I lost my job. But I will tell you that after I mentally walked through them, I realized that life would be just fine.
Of course, I wouldn't have as much stuff. It takes money, and a lot of it, to maintain the American lifestyle; but I wouldn't have lost anything that really matters. Did that ring a bell? If it didn't, you didn't read Alex Green's piece The Only Thing That Really Matters. In it, you'd learn about a long term study of a bunch of Harvard grads who discovered, after nearly a lifetime of experiences, that "the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people".
The 7am phone call from my partner forced me to consider what could happen in the world's economy if I lost my job and my income. It also reminded me that there's another economy in our lives - and it's the one that really counts: God's economy. The currency for His economy isn't counted in dollars - it's counted in people. The richest people in the world are the one's who enjoy the most relationships.
When you think about it, relationships are a lot like money. You have to invest in them to make them grow. What do we invest in our relationships? We invest our most precious commodity - time. The beauty of such investment is that it can never be taken away. That's not to say that our relationships won't have ups and downs - they will. But like a well-managed mutual fund, our relationships will grow in proportion to how much we invest in them.
Do you know someone who's rich in God's economy? I know Frank from my soccer team. He recently presented me with a get well card, signed by my teammates, after my little cycling incident - but he does stuff like that all the time. Frank's rich. The hot brunette, while she takes good care of me, invests a lot of her time taking care of others. The abundance of phone calls, text messages, and cards on special occasions validate it - she's rich.
I could certainly add to this list, but the point is it's in relationships where we experience the most wealth. Let's remember to invest daily.
