Tag: money

Simplify your family

Now for something slightly different….

Family Life Sale

Corey from Simple Marriage and Mandi from Life…Your Way have brought together a super sweet e-book package for those interested in simplifying your family (and your life).

When purchased separately, these ebooks are worth over $450, but for four days only, you can purchase the entire collection for just $47.

Corey’s become a great friend over the last few months as we’ve chatted both online and off-line about a variety of great things. I love his heart and posture and I’m proud to help promote his work (You can listen to his story over at the something beautiful podcast).

Beyond the great material, a portion of each sale will also be donated to Don Miller’s (Blue Like Jazz, Searching for God Knows What) The Mentoring Project, which seeks to rewrite the story of the fatherless generation. VERY COOL!

But as I mentioned above, there’s a catch… This collection is only available from 2 p.m. on March 21st to 2 p.m. on March 24th March 25th. There will be no late sales offered.

Click here to purchase your collection today!
Continue reading Simplify your family

Make money from your blog

Updating my blog | Photo by Jonathan Blundell

I doubt it’s a secret, but I would love to be able to blog/podcast full-time (here, here, here or even here) if I could, or at least add a decent supplement to my regular income (click the “stuff I like” page up top to find some ways you can do that – hint, hint).

And from time to time, I receive random offers to advertise this or that product on my blog for various amounts of lengths of time and money.

Most of the time I trash the offers (solely based on the e-mail or the type of product they want to sell), but depending on the offer, I may take the time to actually investigate the offer and respond.
Continue reading Make money from your blog

In Judas we see our need for community

The Last Supper
The Last Supper | Via Wikicommons

Judas carried with him into that field the burden of not receiving God’s grace because he was removed from the community in which he could hear it. In Judas’ ears there never was placed a word of grace. And let me tell you. …that’s not something the sinner can create for him or herself. – Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon on Judas

She continues…

We cannot in our isolation manufacture the beautiful radical grace that flows from the heart of God to God’s broken and blessed humanity. As human beings there are a lot of things that we can create for ourselves. Entertainment, stories, pain, toothpaste. We cannot create the thing that frees us from the bondage of self the thing the frees us from the shackles of sin and death and the guilt of all of it. We cannot create for ourselves the word of God. We must tell it to each other. You cannot as it was said of Judas “turn aside and go to your own place” of meditation or yoga or your own place of resentment and anger or your own place of voluntary simplicity or even prayer and create the proclamation of God’s grace. That’s why we have community. So that we can stand together under the cross and point to the Gospel. And it takes a good sinner to really get the gospel; which Bonhoeffer says is frankly hard for the pious to understand. Because this grace confronts us with the truth saying: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner, now come as the sinner you are to a God who loves you. God wants you as you are; God does not want anything from you; a sacrifice, a work. God wants you alone.

Nobody said this to Judas.

How would that early Christian community have been different if Judas had received forgiveness as the rest of them had. Again and again Jesus had said they should preach forgiveness of sins in his name. I mean, it was forgiveness of sin that got Jesus in trouble with the pious folks. He was pretty serious about the whole thing – mentioned it all the time even.

Maybe Judas was destined to betray Jesus. Maybe it all had to go down just like it did. And maybe Judas chose death too soon. Maybe he didn’t avail himself of the means of God’s grace…. But maybe his community never sought him out and offered. Maybe extending the Word of God’s forgiveness to Judas was simply too painful for them. Maybe it was easier for Judas to be the identified problem in the family. Certainly would have been tempting to me. Judas is the traitor…not us. We need a villain so that we don’t have to sit in the awkward and discomforting reality that it is actually all of us. Maybe his community failed him….

Read the entire sermon.

What do you think?

Did the community fail Judas? Or was he simply beyond redemption?

Perhaps the greater question…. Who in your community are you failing?

Listen to Nadia’s story on this week’s episode of the something beautiful podcast.

The Crisis of Credit

In case you missed This American Life’s excellent job of explaining The Giant Pool of Money (go listen right away), or you’re more of a visual person, here’s a great visual explanation of why your 401(k) is in the crapper* and why the economy is going with it.

*Yes, I think that’s the official/technical term for the Credit Crisis right now :-).

this is not this

from The Work of the People and Floodgate Productions ::

During financially challenging times, it’s so easy for us to forget who we’re putting our trust in. Are we trusting in Wall Street, or in the God who created it all?

TWOTP have a great selection of videos for your church, group or wherever. They’ve also put together a great selection of videos geared specifically for the current times we find ourselves in. The above video is a free download as part of that collection.

The U.S. housing crisis

In case you haven’t been paying attention, or just simply ignored the crisis, NPR’s This American Life had a great summary and explanation of the current mortgage/housing crisis in the U.S.

Here’s a very brief summary as I understand it. Basically there’s suddenly been all this new money in the world. The amount of money being spent worldwide doubled over the last 6 years.

Poor countries were becoming richer and richer by making things like TVs and selling oil so suddenly there’s LOADS of money with no place to invest. And what good is money if you can’t invest it to make more money for you? So we end up with twice as much money looking for investments but not twice as many places to invest into.

Alan Greenspan kept the fed interest rate at 1% – so that folks couldn’t make money off of us treasury bonds. The show says basically, Greenspan said, “Screw the international pool of money – we’re not going to help you make money off our treasury bonds.” Ha!

So the investors looked for other places to invest – like the US housing market. And investors were willing to take a risk on mortgage loans in order to make well more than 1% on their investments.
But of course the investors don’t want to worry with the hassle of individual loans so folks on Wall Street found a way around the issues and hassle of individual loans. Folks would sign on to a mortgage at 5-10% and then those loans are sold to small banks who then sell them to a guy on Wall Street.

That guy on Wall Street now has several thousand loans with big fat checks coming in every month – and will be scheduled to come in for the next 30 years. So he turns around and sells shares of his investment to all these folks with loads of new money, aka mortgage bank securities.

By 2003, just about everyone who could qualify for a loan could get one – yet the money was just getting started. So the loan qualifications and guidelines got looser and looser till folks could get half-a-million dollar loan without any proof of income.

Of course the more loans you give out, the stronger your security will be.

“We almost couldn’t produce to help keep the appetite of our investors happy.”

And the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Of course this is just a brief summary of a one-hour program. Listen online for the real details and what really started the crisis.