EDITORIAL
Backstage | Jimmy Dodd
Odds are, you’re rich. I’m not referring to being spiritually rich, emotionally rich or relationally rich, but rich rich. Financially rich. And understanding the abundance of your material wealth is essential to living as a faithful follower of Jesus.
Rich is a relative term. If I live in a neighborhood where the average salary is $20,000 a year, and I am pulling in $500,000, my neighbors will conclude I am rich. If I have considerably more than the overwhelming majority of the world, to most global citizens, I am rich. Working with that definition, I conclude that there are three things that make the average American rich: choice, privacy and opportunity.
If you have choice, you are rich. Many in the world today live life without basic choice. More than a billion people wake each day and wear the same clothes, eat the same food (commonly rice and beans), and engage in the same daily activities they did the day before. Many encounter only a handful of daily choices. Conversely, those living in Western culture are presented with hundreds of thousands of choices each day.
Think about it. In America, we wake up and decide which shirt, pants and shoes we will wear—choosing from an embarrassing number of options. We decide what to have for breakfast. If you stop off at a coffee shop, you face hundreds of choices. You may have lunch in a restaurant and choose from an extensive menu. If you swing by the grocery store, there will be close to a hundred thousand choices. If you have an excess of choices in your average day, comparatively you are rich.
Second, if you have an option for privacy, you are rich. The majority of the world does not share the luxury of privacy. The reason why the streets are always crowded in any third-world country is that there are more people than beds, which means that the typical family will sleep in shifts. Most nations experience soaring unemployment. Therefore, when it is not your turn to sleep, and because there is nowhere to go in your typical one-room home, and no job, you walk the streets—because there is no other option. There is literally no place to go to be alone. The majority of the world does not have the luxury of privacy. If you have a place where you can go to be alone, you are comparatively rich.
Finally, if you have basic opportunity, you are rich. Presently, who is the best golfer in the world? Whoever you select, I would argue the likelihood is very high that they are not the best golfer in the world, but rather the best golfer in the world of those who have been privileged to have the opportunity to learn how to play golf. While close to 30 million people play golf in the United States, less than 1% of the world has ever had the opportunity to play golf. The odds are staggeringly high that the athlete with the greatest golf potential is a part of the 99% who never learned how to play golf. If you have the opportunity to grow athletically, educationally or vocationally, you are relatively rich.
Jesus calls his followers to be generous faithful stewards of all we have been given, and many of us have been given overflowing material riches. May we be found faithful.