Finances

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton.

And with me are Michael Dyrham. And Andrew Hudson.

WIC, Shame, and God’s Provision

We had a couple of questions that we had sent in to us that we wanna pair together because they're gonna go together as we address them, but they're gonna seem a little bit different even though they both deal with finances or family finances and how to think about them ethically because both questioners had ethical dilemmas about certain forms of income.

But we'll go ahead and read the first question. The listener says, is it okay for me to use WIC, government assistance? I feel shame about it, but we are barely making it financially. I'm working full-time and doing jobs on the side.

To keep up.

Michael.

Well, that's a good question. WIC is an acronym for Women, Infant, and Children. It's government assistance. It, well, just full disclosure, it's been probably about 15 years ago when my family was on WIC and it was fairly limited.

It involved, you know, check-ins to say, how are things going?

How is the health of the children?

And it was a pretty limited array of what you could get from the store. It was like milk, eggs, cheese, and there was stuff for the babies, you know, formula. You know, I think maybe some diapers were part of it.

I don't know. But it was important for us as a family. I was pastoring full-time and this was post -2008 crisis, financial crisis. We were making, I was making, I think if I remember correctly, before anything was taken out of my check, 28 .6 a year.

So like 60 ,000 a day or something like, what is that?

Oh, yeah, I don't know.

No, man, no.

How many children do you have at the time again?

Oh, we had one, but quickly had two more. And so it was really a bi-vocational posting, but I was doing, I was pastoring full-time and we just, there was, it was very difficult to make it work.

And was this area, was this area rich in capital or was it a pretty poor area?

It was the poorest county in Tennessee.

Yeah.

But yeah, and it wasn't even a question. So it was the poorest county in Tennessee and we just, we needed that to kind of help us along. Now, my wife had to take the kids in for appointments. I think there was probably some structure there that we would find a lot more problematic today because I think they were insistent on the children being fully vaccinated and going through all these different, jumping through hoops.

So there may have been a lot more consternation with we are facing that today, but still it was fairly limited. There seemed to be pretty good accountability in the program. And the, my wife and I were thankful.

Yes, did it feel weird? Did it feel bad? Did we feel like this shouldn't be happening? We shouldn't have to use this program. You know, it should be for others.

We had all those thoughts.

So, but we did, we did use it, but we were also thankful and we made a point of giving thanks to God for the provision.

Since I haven't had any firsthand experience with WIC, can you describe maybe why? So this questioner also mentions shame associated with it. Can you mention why you discussed or felt in your home, like this was for other people and not for us?

Well, there's a sense in which we're not, this is for my family, we had no debt. I didn't have, you know, and I actually dropped out of seminary. So we weren't even paying anything for school because we couldn't afford it.

And that was setting my education aside, which was a pretty important credential for me if I was ever gonna see better opportunities ahead. But we had to set that aside for a while. And it felt like we were doing the right thing and answering the call to ministry to go and pastor full time, to say yes.

And it was, you know, it was a good fit as far as everything else was concerned. We just didn't, it was hardly anything to live off of. So we felt bad that we were taking the assistance because we didn't think that we should have to, I guess.

Maybe it was like, if I'm working full time, this should work, right? This should, we should be able to pay all of our bills. But at the end of the day, we were on WIC. And then when we came around to, but we didn't see any different, mind you, than the child tax credit that would come around every tax year.

And we would portion that out as part of our monthly budget. We were living off of that as well. And so it was, you know, we were scraping by for quite a while. And what was most frustrating, I think, over the long haul, and eventually we stopped using it because for some of our children, because they got too old, they graded out of the program.

And then for the other ones, we were still using it. But it didn't seem like we could ever gain any traction. And I know with some of those programs, they have you report what you have in savings.

Yeah.

Because if it looks like you're saving up so much, then it's clear you don't need the finances anymore. And so they drop you from the program. So you're encouraged not to save. So how do you ever make progress?

So it is actually making you dependent upon that. And it's strange, because we talked about this a little bit before, or at least I might have said something tangentially about it. But there are like limited programs that you can get as a whole family.

And a whole American family. But if you divorce or you're a single parent, or if you're a foreigner who's come over here with your family, there are loads more. You have way better ability to kind of feed off the system that way.

And it's not like we're trying to say that anybody who is going to consider getting on WIC for assistance, that's what you're doing. But it's crazy how you have a questioner with a family kind of anguishing over the fact that they might need to be on it.

And all these other programs exist for higher degrees and levels of dependence. I mean, we've seen in the past week the Somali controversy with the fraud, where all you have to do is open up daycare centers with probably no kids in them, and you're getting millions of dollars in kickbacks.

And you're not even American. And then we have American families struggling to try and raise their children and having shame about like going, feeling shame to go and even apply for this stuff.

You know, that's quite the irony. I would say that when we think about contentment, think about the Lord's provision, and then pursuing a right course, obviously the state is a horrible actor for benevolence.

I mean, just horrible. The state is very, very bad at that job ever since the Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, which enshrined poverty as an American value for many, many different families and many different generations.

Which probably had its roots in New Deal thinking too.

Right, yeah. The idea of perpetual dependence is something that some people grow up expecting of. And I mean, I grew up with, I mean, there was a boy in my high school, he was younger than I was, but his parents were on the disability because of overeating.

And they were just drawing checks.

That was his plan.

His plan was to grow up, you know, overeat, and then also do the same thing. That was his whole plan. There was another situation like that in Mississippi, where, you know, interviewing people, here's a little girl, hey, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

I wanna draw. Oh, that's great. What do you wanna draw? And they're trying to figure out what her art style was. No, she wants to draw a check. That was her expectation for life. And if you recognize that, hey, I'm working hard and I'm having to do extra and we're still not making it, you know, welcome to the twilight of a fiat economy.

Right, this is awful. This is really, really hard to get things happening. And especially if you're walking into life with the expectations that you had when you grew up, like these paychecks should be enough, but then somehow they're not because of fiat currency.

And so what do you do now? Well, you cannot solve the economic crisis.

Right.

Yeah, you can't go rob a bank.

Right.

You can't open up a Somali daycare if you're a believer.

Right, right.

Exactly.

And you can't go be a paid protester to protect the Somali daycares, you know. So what do you do? Well, this is where I think Jesus' counsel in Matthew 6 is very helpful. And so verse 25 of Matthew 6, therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.

Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns that your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither spoil nor spin, yet I say to you that even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

So now if God so clothes the grass, the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, what shall we eat?

What shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? For all these things the Gentiles seek, your heavenly father knows that you need all these things. I guess the thing to remember, hey, your heavenly father knows you need all these things, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, which you'll notice is set in parallel with not worrying, and all these things shall be added unto you.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things, sufficient for the day is its own trouble. So in keeping in mind about how sovereign God is, how in charge he is, how he knows our needs before we even ask, and we see that he is free to act with means or without means to provide for those that he calls his own.

And so if he provides through WIC, you're not ashamed that it came through the government, or you know.

You're not waiting for that next helicopter to rescue you from the rooftop when the flood is there.

And you might say, well, what if something happens and we can't use the program anymore? You still have your heavenly father.

That's a worry for tomorrow, right?

Yes.

And don't be worried about tomorrow.

Exactly.

So when we realized, you know, this is, I mean, this is just not going to work, you know, long-term. And we realized that there was, I don't remember exactly if there was a cap on our savings or anything.

I don't remember what that looked like. I think that may have been another program that we never got into because of that. But the point is that it did help us long enough so that I could restart with school.

And the finances improved a little bit at the church. And so we were able to, I was able to go back to seminary and get a credential that was able to, you know, put us into a better situation. So no one's ever going to out give Liberty Baptist Church.

They were willing to start putting missionary funding to keep me going, which, you know, in the Lord's providence, he had a better way to make sure missionaries were supported and we were supported and praise the Lord in his providence and his timing, it worked out, so.

Yeah, so, and that's what I was going to ask too, because I doubt this is, I mean, it could be an elder's question, but this being a layman, if they had less shame about going to, I mean, they should have less shame about going to ask their local body and deacons about, hey, this is the situation, can you help us?

Yeah, I'm willing to show you everything that we're trying to do here to make ends meet.

Yeah, we certainly have done that with like tuition assistance for, you know, homeschooling or, and or going to a Christian school. And we ask for all the financial information and very often it's pretty clear, like, yeah, you're doing everything you can there.

We don't mind helping with that. We've done that before. Sometimes in benevolence cases, if somebody comes and asks for something all the time, we might say, what we're going to do now is we're going to add some financial counseling here and to kind of help you kind of see what's going on and see if there's anything you can do to change so that you will be helped.

Because we love you.

Exactly.

And, but if somebody was, you know, without, then there's no harm in asking, no shame in asking. And there are a lot of people who'd be willing to help and to give. And I would, I agree that there probably should be a little more willingness amongst the local body for those who are members to say, hey, we're just not, we're just not making it right now.

It's like, we've had to give up on some of these staples. You know, that's going on. Yeah, the church should know about it. Deacon should know about it. There should be some, there should be some help.

Well, and they may even be able to help with like job placement.

Like if that's the thing,.

If you need like a leg up or something like that, or, you know, because especially if it, why we don't know the question or situation, if you're a mother and father family with children and everybody's having to work, you know, the goal is to bring mom back home.

And one of the ways that that can be done is dad starts legging up every so often, getting a better paycheck every now and then.

And it is who you know. I mean, going around and just dropping off a hundred applications, you're probably not gonna get a single interested call back.

Well, especially the parameters that most companies use.

To hire these days as well.

I mean, we've seen a lot of, and there's gonna be more information coming out about how even the bigger corporate ones, especially have hired over the last 10 to 15 years with all the political drama that's gone on, who they're hiring, and it's usually not Americans.

So it makes sense why people are struggling to find leg up in industries that they're trying to work in.

Family Responsibility, Interdependence, and Caring for Aging Parents

For those who are, you know, like the widows who are not being supported by their families, have you ever been involved with scenarios where someone comes to the elders that says, hey, we're needing help?

Have you facilitated conversations with family members on, you know, like, hey, do you know that your brother or your sister or someone you love that you have a familial obligation to is not succeeding?

In fact, is needing help? Have you ever facilitated any conversations with maybe family members that they felt like they, if there's shame in accepting WIC, I know there's a lot of shame in many families of going to a brother or sister or a father or a son or a daughter and saying, hey, I need help.

So in the case of perhaps some aging parents who need care.

Right.

In the main, what I've often tried to encourage conversations between older folks and their children, especially as they begin talking about some of their needs, how it's hard to do this or hard to do that.

It's a signal to say, how often do you talk to your kids about these things? Is there a, you all have a plan and you're all like looking at looking ahead and usually not. Usually there's hardly been any discussion whatsoever.

There's a sense in which the parents are basically on their own, the kids are on their own and there's no real understanding of interdependency at all. No plans have been made. And if there are expectations, they remain unstated.

And, but many times I would say, so that happens fairly often. Now, in general, when someone like that begins to need help and it becomes pretty obvious, then the kids are usually in the position of playing catch up and trying to figure out how to make it work.

And it's, they're just trying to catch up to, oh, wow, we were farther down the road than I thought we were. And how do we get it back up to speed? And it's pretty stressful on everybody, especially when there was no conversations beforehand.

And so you're just making the plan up as you go. That's rough. The other side is there are some older folks who doesn't appear like they have anybody who is gonna be caring for them or nobody who's actively helping.

And sometimes just because they're really mean.

Sure, and just because you're getting older doesn't mean you're getting sweeter.

Yeah, and they're just rude, they're prideful, they're bitter, they're cold, they're very demanding and they're not kind, they're not loving,.

They're not humble.

And there's a reason why their kids don't wanna be around them. So I've noticed that as well. And you try to figure out how to maybe help this along a little bit, you try to encourage and then you realize, oh, and this person who has sown the seeds of bitterness and pride and they're very rude and selfish, they don't get taken care of well, and then they die and then we have a dry funeral.

This is one of the things that I've been thinking about in the near future, just with the demographics of not just Oklahoma, but our country as well. And a lot of this looks like it's coming down the pike.

To me, it looks like it's gonna be some difficult situations that are much more broadly felt than we've had in a while.

Yeah, just because of the sheer numbers.

Yeah, the numbers difference is gonna be, people are gonna be pretty amazed at the fact that you have, the boomer generation is so numerous and they didn't have that many kids and then their kids even have less kids and it's just like, what are we gonna do?

And there's not gonna be, there's almost gonna be not enough hands for the work for all this and it's sad, but it's one of those things I think about every now and then that kind of disheartening.

Yeah, it's never, I mean, it's not too early to have those conversations, talk about what's the plan, what's the goal, what's the end game and to have those conversations and to not just talk about it as if like, this is what I think should happen.

But there's the affirmation of the parents saying to the children, here's what we're doing to help you get ready. Of course, we don't know what the future holds so we're depending upon the Lord, but we want you to know we're here to help you and support you and you gotta know at some point, I'm talking to my eldest son, it's like one of these days, you're the one who's gonna be taking the lead and I don't wanna be sitting over in the corner in my rocking chair and I want you to know that right now I've got your back and then I'll have your back.

I'm kind of in the coaching mode right now, the counselor mode right now, but one day I'm gonna be sitting back kind of as, somebody who could try to help wherever I can, but there's gotta be a really integrated, thoughtful handing off of the baton and there has to be an expectation that's built into family discussions and family, actually actual family planning.

Yeah, multi-generational plans. And that would, that definitely help. Having an idea of families being more integrated together and supportive of one another and then having a church full of those types of families who are supporting one another and supporting each other in the church, how many of the problems go away?

You know, and there's, I mean, seriously, there's a lot of strength to be recovered in that.

I totally agree. I can actually envision a different era that's projected than what's being projected upon us with the aging demographics as a renaissance for familial piety and the devotion to those that you actually, we talked about on a previous podcast, are told to care for.

But Jesus said, by this all men will know that you are my disciples by the love that you have for one another. And it's gonna show up in the way that the families in the church help each other. Now, you may be wanting to help your parents or you're hoping that things work out with your children and so on, but you can't give, Jesus reminds us though, sometimes there's going to be a choice between following Jesus and getting along with your family.

Right, that's gonna happen.

Prod us forward.

And so we pray that doesn't happen, but as much as it depends upon us to live at peace with all men, one of the main things I have in my head is that I'm going to need to ask the Lord's grace and favor to help me be humble as I begin to need help.

And I'm gonna need help long before I think I need help. And I'm gonna have to step aside. I'm gonna be John the Baptist with my children, promoting them, saying, I must decrease, you must increase at some point, right?

I mean, that's the only way to help that hand off. I mean, so those are things that are operating in my mind and in the background, but it has to come to the foreground and we have to have some discussion about it and some direction for it.

But that's related to this question about, here I am working two or three jobs trying to make ends meet and I can't, and we're having to go get WIC to help sustain this.

Is this bad?

No, I don't think it's bad that you're using WIC. Give thanks to the Lord for his provision. But let's remember that it's, moving forward, it's gonna be all the more important that we not see ourselves as isolated units, that we all have to be self-sufficient, maintained units without any cooperation and coordination.

Amen. Yeah, so no shame in it. Just look to praise the Lord for it and look forward to getting off of it as well in the future. And we'll move on to our next question, which is tangential and it can play into this intergenerational planning as well.

But the, and it also deals probably with a little bit of shame about the ethics of what's being posited here. But the questioner asks, one thing that has been a topic of conversation in a small group of ours is the biblical perspective on whether or not it is appropriate to earn money from passive incomes.

Some focuses have been on rental properties where a tenant is paying more for rent than the mortgage payment, which includes equity. Loaning or investing money where interest income is earned or working to the point where one's life has established a passive income sufficient to sustain their lifestyle.

The tension points in the conversation are, should we always be actively working for the income we are receiving? And should our money have the ability to make money perpetually?

Thoughts.

Jesus didn't tell the wicked servant that he, you know, like there's this passive income stream. You couldn't have done that either.

No, he said, give it to the bankers.

Yeah, they change money for a living. Yeah, that's all they're doing. How active is that, right?

Money changing?

You have to know things.

Yeah, it's just knowing the arbitrage.

What's passive about that though? You know, like, well, what we view as passive needs to be altered, I suppose.

Yeah, I think there is something in the water these days wherein if you're a landlord and other people are paying you money to live on your properties, that makes you inherently evil, bad. You're doing something wrong.

I think that has more to do with Marxism than it does the Bible.

Yeah, it's not an inherent situation. You can be a great landlord and you can be a bad landlord.

Yeah, like buying up like 50 homes in Texas and doing section eight housing. That way you make sure you get like a check every single month from the government. And most of your houses are filled with foreigners or broken families.

Are you caring for your properties? Or you want them to have good things?

And are you caring for the people that are going to be in your properties as well? Like there is such a, like the question.

It presupposes a lot.

It does.

And I understand it because they're looking at the rental properties market and broad swaths rather than you're not BlackRock. Let's just say that. Like if you're buying up three or four homes and you're renting out to people in your local community that need a home, you're not doing what BlackRock's doing.

We'll just, you're not on the same ethical plane. I think that's where the confusion is. It's like, since bad people do this, it must be bad.

That's good. I think that carries a lot.

You can have bad bankers and good bankers.

Correct.

Yeah, so it's not, so there, I think there's, so there's a little bit more qualification to the question, particularly where it says, some focuses have been on rental properties where a tenant is paying more for rent than the mortgage payment, which includes equity.

As an example, another example, loaning or investing money where interest incomes earn or working to the point where one's life is established at passive income, sufficient to sustain their lifestyle.

Okay, so the point is like, you should have this one-to-one correlation of work per earning. Otherwise, there's something fishy about that at best or unrighteous about that at worst. So there's, I think it'd be very difficult to oversimplify.

I mean, it's easy to oversimplify, but difficult to answer a question that makes that many assumptions. So, but I think it gives some clarity from the scriptures. Now, I wanna read that parable out of Luke, but just to be practical, there's a reason why landlords charge more than the mortgage payment.

Because if you're a landlord, you have a lot of other concerns that you're trying to pay for and concern yourself with.

Homes are, they are money pits.

They are

Try not maintaining it.

Yeah, right, exactly.

The maintenance on it, especially the way we build them these days, we aren't building thousand-year homes. We're building, at max, we're building like 60-year homes and it's getting worse and worse by the day.

And you add into that, they've gotta be at least beating nominal inflation on top of all that.

And you're holding, so you're holding the risk.

Oh yeah, and you're holding a depreciating asset in the sense that its structure is depreciating. You know, it may be like nominally inflating, but the structure itself is depleted.

The landlords on the Fiat treadmill, just like the lessee is, you know? Your tenant is definitely on it too, I get it, but so is the landlord.

Yep, and the same thing goes with the idea of loaning or investing money where interest income is earned. Once again, you're taking on your risk. Well, what's the reward for the risk? Even something as simple as, I'm gonna take my Bitcoin and we're gonna put it up in the Lightning Network and then we're gonna pitch a few sats along the way.

You're still taking what belongs to you and putting it to service to help the Lightning chain work well. And you could catch a few sats on the way down. Now, other than push a few buttons, you know, I'm not having a one-to-one correlation necessarily in my earnings.

Is that wrong? But once again, I'm putting something that I own to work. Like the old cowboy sitting on his front porch and he just whistles to his blue heeler and his blue heeler runs around and brings the cattle home all from the confines of his front porch.

Well, you didn't go out there.

And personally smacked the cow in the head and dumped the cattle home. Well, that's, okay, that's not how all life works.

And they're confusing their immediate time with stored time, which is capital. Like, you know, what's been said in a lot of economic circles that I've heard over and over and over again is that the most precious commodity in human's lives is time.

It's like lifetime.

And when you've got somebody who has stored up lifetime wisely and they bought three or four homes and they're renting it out, they are putting at risk their entire lifetimes, stored life, they're putting at risk their entire time of their life.

And when you are thinking about it, and Justin, it's almost like the labor theory of time, like the way that some of this is, or sorry, the labor theory of value is almost what it is I'm hearing in my head, which is kind of like the landlords are bad and this and that.

Like anybody who can store capital is, oh yeah, anybody who can store capital is bad. And there are good and righteous ways of getting capital, and then there are bad and unrighteous ways of getting capital as well.

But capital in and of itself is not ethically wrong.

Or ethically good.

It's just a tool that can be used back and forth. And the questioner is kind of like a, I'm trying to figure out how to put this, but the thinking of capital in the way that they are is not capital in reality.

If you get what I'm saying.

Yeah, well, so the third thing they said is, is it right or wrong to work to the point where one's life is established, a passive income sufficient to sustain their lifestyle, which would be retirement.

Right.

All right, so the idea is that you ought to be working. Now, I would agree that God made us in his image and that we ought to be productive and about things that bring him glory. Now, if I happen to be able to work and labor and put things in order so that I'm not laboring today for tomorrow's bread, that doesn't make me unrighteous.

It just means that I'm more free to do other things and I can do it all to the glory of God. Abraham was an incredibly wealthy man. And there was no sense in which Abraham got up on a Tuesday and had to do something where he wouldn't eat on Wednesday.

But Abraham was a righteous man and he had a lot of wealth and a whole lot of people depended on him to maintain that wealth and to use it well. And God greatly blessed him. So I think there's a false equivocation.

There's a bringing together of two ideas as necessarily connected that I have to be working for what I immediately have. And it's not necessarily true. You could have what you have and it'd be enough for the rest of your life and you are laboring on doing other things and you're managing it and you're thinking multi-generationally and so forth.

And again, I promise we're gonna loop, but there are two books that got into the water that were based out of some leftist ideas that made their way through evangelicalism and it's still in the water today.

And it's trickled down through the teachings and discipleship and all those sorts of things. One of those was Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper and the other one was Radical by David Platt. And those two books made the rounds and their ideas went everywhere.

And so basically what they said was, if you do anything to be enhancing and uplifting your life, broadening your financial holdings and increasing your equity, your capital,.

So on and so forth,.

Then there's something wrong with you. You're not glorifying God, you're being selfish and you're a bad person. And what you should be doing is make only what, imagine this, just make exactly what you need and then give everything else away.