Different worlds

Lately, I have been so irritated with money. How we make it, how we spend it, what a constant topic of conversation it seems to be. "How can we adjust the grocery budget again?" "What will we do with our tax refund?" "How much can we realistically spend on a house and still buy organic dairy products and meat but pesticide-full vegetables."
 When you don't have it, you talk about it all the time. When you do have it, well, I don't remember what you do when you do have it! How do people afford this; I ask myself as I look at our local Homebuyers guide. There are pages of beautiful million dollar properties on beautifully landscaped acres of land. It truly feels like a different world in which those potential inhabitants must live.
 When you live on a tight budget, which so many of us do, money becomes something frustrating, elusive, something to examine and dissect. I actually despise talking about money and somehow feel all things that help us learn and grow as people should be free. (I.E. education, medical care, music lessons and sports team fees.) And while I worry about money, my kids are in ski lessons,  on swim teams and visiting museums, as well as having more clothes (cute ones!!) than they will ever need.
     On the other hand, I wear my sister in law's slightly too long jeans because I refuse to spend money for new ones, clip coupons like a maniac, use a children's consignment sale for Christmas presents and buy my poor dog (gasp!) dog food with chicken byproduct meal somewhere in the ingredients. I think most parents, especially in this intense parenting age, do put their kids needs and wants in front of their own; that's no surprise. What is fascinating to me is the ways in which we choose to spend the rest of it; our spending priorities. What value do we place on the things we consume and the things in which we participate?.
     I've often heard suggested, as an exercise in time management to write down everything you do in a day and put the results in a pie chart to see if your priorites match up with reality. Would this work for finances as well? If we were to chart where our money goes, what would the biggest blocks be? How much would go towards necessities (residence, food, water, heat) and how much would be spent honoring our individual value system and whatever that entails (possibly education, charity work, retirement savings, vacations, gifts). Obviously, money has become, of late, a source of endless frustration and pondering on my part.
     As usually happens in this amazing place we like to call the universe, God had a serious reality check in store for me after all this pathetic focus on money. While sitting on the couch in my 80 degree living room (thank you woodstove) on an eleven degree day, I picked up the latest book my husband brought home from his green library. It's called Love in the Driest Season and it chronicles, within a family memoir, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic in Zimbabwe during the 90's. The focus is on the abandoned children that are in the care of orphanages that have been given 30 cents a day per child for food, clothing and medicine. That's right; thirty cents. Needless to say, many of the children die in a very short time.
     So, in the very recent past and (I'm sure) somewhere in the world in the present, there are children who breathe their last breath in a hospital room waiting for anitibiotics that will never come, while I decide between the (clean, safe) organic almond milk or the (clean, safe) regular almond milk awash in stress over money.

  Thank you, God, for making it so clear how rich my life is and also the ways in which we can enrich others' lives.