“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.” Matthew 6:33
Under normal circumstances, panel discussions are about as spellbinding to me as watching my bran flakes soak up skim milk. But this one was an exception.
My late wife and I were attending a Christian conference sponsored by one of our favorite ministries. The experts at the dais were advising us about how to invest our capital in such a way as to allow for tax-sheltered security, provide for retirement, and create ways for funds to be available for our progeny and charitable work when we’re gone.
One of the men on the panel had lived his whole life in Eastern Europe under com- munist domination. I was feeling like he was out of place in this session. I had figured that Peter and his family had never been challenged with questions about 401Ks and IRAs. He sat silently at his microphone for the first thirty minutes of the discussion.
Then the moderator asked the inevitable question to this silent participant, “So Peter, what do you think about all of this?”
Peter cleared his throat, nervously sat up straight, and slid the microphone closer. He stared at the audience for just a moment, creating serious uncertainty for every- one. “Well,” he finally said in his deep English-is-my-second-language accent. “We don’t have retirement plans where I come from.” He paused. We were frozen in our seats—no one even blinked. Peter slid the microphone even closer.
“We don’t have investment plans,” Peter repeated. “We have families.”
Although the session continued for another half hour, I didn’t hear any more. I cannot tell you anything anyone said from that moment on. I made no additional notes on my yellow legal pad.
Long before there were stockbrokers and no-load mutual funds, centuries prior to retirement plans and investment counselors, men and women had children. They raised these children with lavish love and unwavering discipline. The children grew up and their parents grew old. When Dad and Mom got so feeble that they could no longer support themselves, the family took over. So much mutual respect had been poured into this setting that no one even noticed that taking care of these elderly parents was hard work. “After all,” the children would say, “They cared for us when we couldn’t care for ourselves.”
“I wonder what it would do to families everywhere,” I said to my wife later that day, “if parents knew that in their old age they would be completely dependent on their children. How differently would we treat our responsibility in raising them if we knew that they’d use these learned skills to care for us when we were unable to care for ourselves?”
I came home from the conference a bit of a different dad. Of course, I didn’t fire my financial adviser or cash in my portfolio, but I did look in a new way at the investment I was making in my children. What if, I remember thinking, my personal long-term security was only a dividend of my investment in my family now? What if I had no other collateral than this?
I still have no idea why the conference planner put Peter on the stand that day— unless God did it to seriously interrupt my life. Yes, maybe that was the reason.