I am yet to meet anyone who does not need money. They may regard it with less importance than most, but at the very least, they value it for its ability to help them acquire things or services they might need—things they could not obtain any other way.
In a previous article, I introduced this new series on money that will be running for the next couple of articles on this blog. In there, I layed the foundation for why I am making this series at all. You can check it out here. But for now, let us proceed with the topic of why money is important, which is the focus of this article.
The absence of money in the lives of many people has altered their destinies in ways that make it impossible to honestly claim that “money is not important.” A week ago, for example, I sat on a bus with a gentleman who was charming, kind, and extremely hilarious. As a result, we talked and laughed about many things during the course of the trip. What started as a lighthearted conversation eventually turned serious when we began discussing bigger matters: finances, the course our lives had taken since we left school, and where we currently stood compared to where we had hoped to be. It was a particularly meaningful conversation, as he and I were age mates who had joined university around the same time. Please note that this was not for the purpose of comparison, but rather an honest exchange about our lives’ passions, hopes, and ambitions.
We had both been science students during our A’ levels. I could tell that between us, he was definitely the better science student—both from the way he spoke and because he had earned a government scholarship to study science education. He had wanted to study human medicine and would have, as he had qualified for it, had he been able to afford self-sponsorship. But because his parents could not, he accepted the government scholarship to study science education instead.
I, on the other hand, had not been equally brilliant to qualify for government sponsorship for any course. I went on to study veterinary medicine on private sponsorship. By those money-determined choices, our lives took vastly different turns. I will not go into the specifics of how this played out, but listening to him speak, it was unmistakable—the hunger in his voice and spirit—that he longed for far more from life than he currently had. His matching brilliance made his ambitious thirst doubly torturous.
Here we were: two individuals whose destinies had been shaped largely by the respective availability or absence of financial resources, enabling one and denying the other the opportunity to pursue the career of their heart’s desire. This story is all too common in Uganda. Too common, I must repeat, for us to claim honestly that “money is not important”
Money is power. Not all power, but certainly a form of it—one that can move a life in any direction, for better or worse. Both its presence and its absence bear great weight. It is therefore no use denying that money is important. There are, of course, those who regard money with a lustful greed, but those are not the people this series is addressing.
For this series, I am speaking to those for whom money has become one of those stubborn areas of life that they just cannot seem to figure out. Yet in the meantime, it continues to press upon them daily with a frustration that refuses to yield. Money is power. Money is important. It is therefore right—and good—to desire it, not for its own sake, but for the things, both material and immaterial, that it can afford us.
This is important to say and emphasize because we must clear away any mental blocks that cause us to fear money, especially when we start to talk about getting it, retaining it, growing it, and accumulating it. We need not think of ourselves as greedy, selfish, or ungodly simply because we acknowledge our need and desire for money.
I understand that money is often presented in ways that can be a turn-off for people who (rightly) hold to the belief that money is not everything. To people like this, I assure you: that is not how we will be discussing money here. This will be a healthy, godly, and empowering conversation.
With this background—and with, I hope, a sense of freedom in how we think about money—let us now begin to really talk about it.
Regards,
Anna Grace
