I’ve always been someone who was more than happy to let someone else take care of the money. I never thought I was any good at finances, and I also never had the interest or felt the need to learn how to manage my personal finances in a way that set me up securely for the future. Now that I find myself responsible for my current and future financial management, I have some learning to do.
One thing that I have learned over the years is how to teach myself and do research to find out what it is I need to know, so I have looked at my need to educate myself in this area as somewhat of a challenge. I’ve been reading and researching and learning about things like taxes, retirement account options, insurance options, savings accounts, investments, wills, financial planning and so on. Dull, tedious study to be sure, but over the course of it, I’ve learned some principles about investing that have given me a new outlook on the spiritual investments that I have made over the years.
Unlike many of my contemporary peers who have spent the last 20 years investing in their education, a car, a house, their financial future, etc., I have invested my time and my life into serving the Lord and others with the Family, into my relationship with the Lord and the things of the Spirit. My investment plan up until very recently has been solely eternal and has contained absolutely no temporal elements. I find there are temporal investing principles that I can also apply to my eternal investments.
For example:
* People invest in the hopes that their investment will increase over time and they will eventually have more than they started with. However, an investment always carries a certain amount of risk. You can never be 100% sure of any investment you make. You can, of course, do your research and make informed decisions, but whether it’s a temporal or a spiritual investment, every investment carries with it a certain amount of risk.
* Long-term investments can appear to have more value at a certain point in time and less value at other times. Just because an investment I made may appear to have less value to me in this moment does not mean it was an unwise investment or that I should give up on it. The perceived value of an investment can and will fluctuate over time, and I won’t be certain of the final return on the investment until the end of the day. In the case of my eternal investments, I won’t receive the full benefits until the next life.
* A mistake you can make is speculating with your investment or trading your account. You can get fidgety and anxious, feeling like your investment is losing value, and pull out your investment money in an attempt to find a better investment elsewhere. With a spiritual investment, there is no “money” to be pulled out, but I have come mighty close to pulling out the faith I have in my spiritual investments. Besides the fact that trading accounts will cost you in commissions, fees, and taxes, you also run the risk of losing the full value of your investment if your next one doesn’t pan out as you had hoped.
* It’s wise to build a portfolio that is diversified. When investing, you don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket. This is something that I hadn’t really considered until now. Recently, I have begun to add additional “temporal” elements to my overall investment portfolio, but it doesn’t mean I should give up on the spiritual investment that has been growing faithfully all these years.
There are so many new practical and physical things to consider and plan for, and when life dictates that I put my focus on these things, it seems easier for my spiritual investment to lose value in my eyes. Or, maybe it’s the difficulty of what comes up for me when I become aware of how little value many in the world place on the things that have been of such high value to me. When faced with this contradiction, some of the decisions I’ve made can seem so much more foolish than they did when I was so well surrounded by the support of like-minded believers, and it’s easy to start wondering if I made a mistake or if I was unwise to invest the way that I did. It doesn’t help that others of my contemporary peers are so much further ahead than I am and I’m just starting from scratch in so many physical, practical ways. I love Peter’s post on Director’s Corner called “Building Our Personal Eternity,” and I have listened to it several times. It builds my faith.
Learning some of these investment principles has strengthened my faith in my spiritual investments. While I may need to add new practical elements to my overall investment portfolio, and there are new things to learn and do, it would be unwise of me to conclude, “Oh, my spiritual investment has lost its value, so I had better trade it in for something else.” The better choice for me is to protect it, to continue to let it build and work for me. Not to trade it out, but to have faith that it’s maturing, that it’s going to pay dividends in the future, and that one day I’m going to be very glad that I protected that investment and didn’t toss it out because there was a time when it seemed to lose some value in my eyes!
I believe this concept is what Paul was talking about when he said, “Cast not therefore away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward!”1
1 Hebrews 10:35.
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