A Wonder-Full Life

October is our official stewardship season here at High Street, although stewardship is a year-round activity. Stewardship is not about deciding what we’ll give to the church for any given year. It’s a spiritual practice, a response to God’s love with our own love, a way we recognize both that we and everything we’ve been given actually belongs to God, and that we are simply “stewards” of those gifts. We are entrusted to care for the gifts, and to share them with God and one another for the glory of God. And we agree in our vows of membership to support the church with our prayers, our presence, our service, our witness, and our GIFTS.

All that said, once a year we have a set period we call “stewardship” when we seek the estimates of giving from each of you to help us with budgeting and planning purposes. That, too, is good stewardship.

This year, our stewardship series is called, “A Wonder-Full Life,” and is inspired by the book, Integrating Money and Meaning by Maggie Kulyk and Liz McGeachy, in which the authors help us look at our own money practices through the lens of the classic Frank Capra movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. We all have our own issues around money. Through scripture, images and characters drawn from the movie, and concepts from the book, we’ll look these issues squarely in the face and shine a light on our money practices with compassion in ways that can bring us greater spiritual peace.

This can be very scary AND inspiring. But our own acts of generosity (we might call them “stewardship”) are affected greatly by the underlying fear most of us have lurking in the shadows – even if we seem secure; like we “have it all together.” There’s a reason that “death and taxes” are said to be the two things we fear most. It turns out there is a strong relationship between our fear of death and our inability to have peace about money.

Spiritual practices feed that part of ourselves that is oriented toward serenity, harmony, truth, compassion, gratitude, love and joy. But these are not always words we use to describe the role of money in our lives. In the classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a crisis of money creates vastly diverse reactions from several characters that can hold up a mirror to our own relationships with money. In this four-week series, we will “look” squarely in the face of our money issues in compassionate ways that can offer more depth of meaning, healing, and wholeness and a whole new “outlook” on what constitutes a wonderful – and “wonder-full” – life.