Treat money as you would treat a loaf of bread in your bread drawer ... It is matter of fact, it is neutral. It is nothing to get particularly excited about. It provides a certain amount of sustenance and nourishment.
If your neighbor or someone you met needed a slice of bread, you would give him one. You might even give him more than one. After all, it's only bread. There is plenty of bread in this world!
If you ran out of bread, you would probably not freak out. You would think, well, I'll get my fiber elsewhere for a while, until I get some more bread. I'll run into some bread somewhere. ... Ah, here we go, a nice bag of almonds!
You notice that the world offers many forms of love and support, not just bread.
If you met someone who had piled loads and loads of bread into storage in their house, you'd think: That's a bit weird. Other people could use that bread. Kind of a waste, really.
What if they put a list of people on magazine covers: The Top Ten Bread Hoarders of the World!
What if everyone thought that having more bread made them happier, more powerful, more secure and even sexier?
Of course, you can only eat so much bread in one day, and then storing the bread so that it would not be subject to mold, mildew and other forms of degradation, locking it up so that it would not be stolen, would become complicated. Perhaps even stressful.
Whole industries would arise around protecting and storing bread. People might become desperate in their desires to gather and safeguard bread--they might abandon everything, their families, their pets, their ethics, their peace of mind. They might suck up to nasty bosses who give them bread, they might trample the earth to create giant bread factories.
You get the point.
One of the most beautiful messages in the Bible is this: "Take no thought! ... Not for what you shall wear, nor how you shall be clothed. For your Heavenly Father [Life!] knoweth you have need of these things, and it His good pleasure to give you the Kingdom."
Life is here to support You, Friend!
Money is simply a tool of exchange. Fear of money, or granting great, unwarranted powers to money has made us slaves to that which is external to us. Rather than find that which truly makes us happy--that which abides within--as a society, we run furiously on the futile treadmill of More and Not Enough.
Money. A safety pin. A garden hose. A loaf of bread.
Shakespeare said "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." And in truth, nothing means anything, unless thinking makes it so.
Money, or, more properly, our thinking about money, is driving this poor world into the ground. And the only way to release the world from the mad grip of money, is to loosen its grip on us--so that we can show the world, by our own example:
It's not about the money!
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