Budgeting for Believers

Widening tax bands, lowering the top rate of tax, raising pensions, increasing social welfare allowances, the business of budgeting; and all in an effort to make things more equitable.  Budgeting is on the Lord's mind too it seems.  Widening pathways, lowering mountains and hills, topping up valleys and straightening crooked ways, all with the aim of making ground level so that we can pass safely in joy by the light of God.

Some people budget for Christmas spending, some prefer to blow their budget in a spirit of boom and bust.  And while analysts and commentators outdo each other in the effort to decide who benefits and who looses out in the Budget, most of us prefer to get on with the business of living, believing perhaps that between the jigs and the reels we will remain pretty much as we were.

It would be a great pity if we were to adopt a similar attitude to the kind of budgeting the Lord desires to bring about in our lives; if Christmas were to come and go once more without any of the budgeting of time and energy that would allow us to receive Christ with joy.  Staying then with those telling Budgetary verbs of action, could I decide to:

Widen a road or path that is my driven-ness, my being too busy or too preoccupied with doing, working, achieving to include time for rest, reflection and relationship.

Raise a valley that is a regret or hurt, or sin or failure that brings me down, and do this simply asking God's mercy and healing to fill this part of my life.

Lower a hill of certainty, of always being right, to listen freshly and hear differently the hearts cry of another, not just in what they say, but perhaps even more in the silence of their frustration and struggle to be heard.

The Divine Budget is indeed a bountiful one.  Jesus comes to minister the Father's incentives, mercy, compassion, understanding; and the dividends, peace and joy are for all who budget in the Divine Economy.

Fr. Eamon Devlin, CM

10th December 2006