For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Many relate this Bible quote to greed. However, there's more to this than that. The first thing to note is that money isn't the root of all evils, as some claim. It's merely one of many sources of evil, and this is only the case when money is highly coveted. Money doesn't lead to evil, it merely has the potential to do so when our love for it becomes unhealthy.
Furthermore, the nature of the evil associated with a love for money is laid out in the text. Such love has a tendency to lead us astray so that we end up hurting ourselves and others instead of benefiting from what money can provide.
This was illustrated to me when I had to stop my wife from getting herself vaccinated a few weeks back. Part of her argument was that she had to do this in order to secure her income. The alternative would be to dig into our savings in the event of further vaccine related restrictions. However, when I pointed out that our savings are there precisely for this kind of events, her argument unraveled, and that's how I ended up stopping her from making a bad decision.
Interestingly, my wife's predicament wasn't due to greed. Rather, it was due to her being too timid. She assumed that my love for our savings exceeded my love for her; and that's where she went astray.
The faith mentioned in the Bible is our faith in God, aka Nature, and the evil is any straying from this in pursuit of something else. My wife was about to stray from the faith, as it were. She was prepared to sacrifice herself for money. However, that didn't happen, and the consequence of this has been very positive. Her confidence and self esteem has improved, as well as her trust in me.
However, this doesn't mean that we should ignore the value of money. I would never spend our life saving on a medical procedure with a small chance of success or minimal utility. Our savings are meant for our son. I'm not going to steal from his inheritance in order to give myself a few extra months of life. There are limits to how much I'm willing to spend on myself at the expense of future generations. But my wife was about to sacrifice herself for mere pennies, and that would have been a monumental error at the other extreme.
The trick is to find the right balance. Money should not be so coveted that we put ourselves at risk, nor should it be so easily spent that future generations become disadvantaged.
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| Gold eagle |
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