I Cannot Afford What This Day Expects

You know how this goes because you have been here before.

It starts reasonably. A few things, nothing extravagant, and you are being careful. And then there is the one for the person you forgot, and the thing that turned out to cost more than you thought, and the moment where you are standing somewhere at eight in the evening deciding whether to be the person who does not get it.

And you get it. Of course you get it. And in January the whole thing arrives as a number, and the number sits on you for four months.

I want to name what is actually happening there, because it is not a spending problem and it is not a character weakness.

You are being carried. There is a current that runs through this day, made of what everybody else appears to be doing, what you did last year, what a child said in October, and what you think somebody will feel if their thing is smaller than somebody else's thing. And it moves you, decision by decision, past a line you never actually drew.

The reason it works is that you never drew the line. You went in with a rough sense of being careful, which is not a number, and a rough sense cannot stop anything.

And before anything else: the money is real. You genuinely cannot afford what this day expects. That is not a mindset and it is not a failure of planning, and I am not going to tell you the money will turn up if you hold on, because sometimes it does not, and people who were told otherwise ended up blaming themselves for a bank balance.

She hath done what she could

There is a moment where a woman does something extravagant and gets criticized for it, and the sentence Jesus uses to defend her is the one I want.

She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. (Mark 14:8, King James Version)

She hath done what she could.

Now, the whole scene is about cost. People in the room are doing arithmetic about what her jar was worth, and they are annoyed about it, and the criticism is framed as being about the poor.

And He does not answer the arithmetic. He does not say the amount was appropriate, or that it was a good use of money, or compare it to anything anybody else brought.

She hath done what she could. That is the measure, and it is a measure of capacity rather than of amount. What she could. Not what was expected, not what would look right, not what somebody else in that room would have considered adequate.

And that means a small thing done by somebody with little is measured exactly the same way. The sentence works in both directions, and if it is the standard for extravagance, then it is the standard for a very tight December too.

You are measured by what you could, and heaven has never once compared your amount to anybody else's. Mark 14:8 answers a room doing arithmetic with a sentence about capacity rather than cost, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real measure and not a consolation.

A number, decided before

Here is the practical thing, and it is the whole of the article.

Decide the number now, before you buy anything.

Not a budget with categories. One number, total, that you will not go past. Write it down somewhere you will see it in December, because in December you will not remember what October you thought.

And here is why it has to be now and it has to be a number. The current I described does not push against a number. It pushes against a feeling of being careful, and it wins every time, because a feeling can be adjusted in the moment by a child's face or a shop at eight in the evening or the memory of last year.

A number cannot be adjusted in the moment. That is not because you are disciplined. It is because you decided it when nothing was pressing on you, and the version of you who decided it had more information about January than the version standing in the shop.

Choose a number you can pay for without borrowing. Say it out loud to yourself. Then, when December comes, you are not deciding anything under pressure, you are only keeping something you already decided when you were calm.

You are able to decide the number while nothing is pushing you, and it has never once been possible to decide it well in a shop at eight in the evening. The written word measures the gift by what the giver had rather than by the amount, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a person to hold a line they drew in advance.

What the number is not

I want to be careful here, because there are two lies that attach themselves to this subject and both do damage.

The first is that the amount is the love. That the smaller thing communicates something smaller about how you feel. It does not, and nobody in your family will remember the amount, and the ones who would judge it are not the ones you should be spending your January on.

The second is worse, and it is the one this site will never do. It is the suggestion that if you had more faith, or gave more, or trusted better, the money would be there. That is not in the Bible and it has ruined people. Faithful people go short. God does not fail them, and their December is still tight, and both of those things are true at once.

So the number is not a spiritual test. It is arithmetic, done in advance, by somebody who is going to be here in January.

You are not being tested by the size of what you can spend, and God has never once tied His faithfulness to your bank balance. Mark 14:8 praises what a person could do without ever naming a required amount, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a hard December from turning into a verdict.