Time Poverty is all too common in first-world society. Hard-working people find themselves locked in the office or commuting for most of their waking hours each day, usually for at least five or six days a week. Many are forced to hold down two jobs just to make ends meet.
As such, many hard-working Christians may find themselves to be money-rich but time-poor. In other words, they manage to make rent or mortgage payments and pay their bills each month but they have little time for anything outside of work. This is Time Poverty
I would argue that Christians need to be time-rich. After all, Jesus has given us the keys to the kingdom! He has called us to share God’s love and preach the good news of the gospel to all the world.
And yet… all to often, we fail in this because we simply don’t have the time.
Sure, we could quit our jobs but this would simply change our lot from time-poor to money-poor. Not really a solution to the problem. So how should we escape this vicious cycle?
According to Wikipedia, marketing analysis suggests that significant differences in behavior and attitudes impact the buying habits of the following four groups of people:
- ‘money-poor, time-poor’
- ‘money-poor, time-rich’
- ‘money-rich, time-poor’ and
- ‘money-rich, time-rich’
As with so much in life, the lines of cause and effect often become blurred. By way of example, if someone moved from one of the above groups to another, the research shows that their buying habits are likely to change. By the same token, if someone changed their buying habits, they are equally likely to find that they will have moved from one group to another over time.
In other words, your lot in life determines your buying habits, just as much as your buying habits determine your lot in life. But here’s the good news. Changing your lot in life may be difficult – but changing your buying habits is easy. Painful, yes, but doable.
A Modern-Day Time Poverty Parable
So how do we overcome Time Poverty as Christians? Let’s look at a real-world scenario.
Ben and Karen are a hard-working Christian couple with a typical money-rich, time-poor spending pattern. They make a decent living but they both spend twelve to fourteen hours each day either at the office or commuting between work and home.
They make their mortgage and car payments each month and, somehow, always manage to break even after paying all their bills. However they only manage this because both of them have reasonably high-paying jobs.
There is little money left for luxuries and even family holidays over the summer are generally paid for with a credit-card which they then pay off over several months. By the grace of God, they usually pay the card down just in time for the Black Friday run-up to Christmas.
Ben and Karen have a burning passion to minister to unreached people in the Amazon, Peru. They support some missionaries there through their local church but God has placed a deep desire in their hearts to actually go there and experience this ministry first-hand. A full trip would require ten weeks over the summer; time they can simply not afford to take off work. While they would love to spend ten weeks each year preaching the gospel in the Amazon jungle, it is simply not feasible. They are locked in Time Poverty. This is their lot in life.
Now, what if Ben and Karen made a slight adjustment to their spending pattern? Let’s assume they traded both of their cars, which are heavily financed, for two much cheaper vehicles which they could purchase for cash? This would immediately give them breathing room by removing two of their major monthly expenses.
Next, Ben and Karen use that saved cash each month to pay off their credit cards, quickly reducing their monthly expenses even further. After a year, having reduced their credit to zero, this couple now has a large amount of surplus cash each month. They dutifully save this over the next year.
At this point, Ben and Karen are tempted to spend their entire nest-egg on that trip to the Amazon but they recognize this temptation for what it is; a money-rich, time-poor spending pattern. It might just about cover the cost of one trip – if they reloaded the credit card to make up the balance and paid that off over the following year. It is not sustainable and will not achieve what God has called them to do.
Instead, they continue to save for two more years until they have enough to put down as a deposit on a rental property. The following year, their rental income coupled with their surplus earnings leaves them with enough cash to cover their normal monthly expenses for four weeks. Ben and Karen take one month of unpaid leave along with their standard two-week vacation and embark on their first six-week trip to Peru with their children over the summer.
It’s not the full ten weeks, but it is a start. Over the next few years, their rental property increases in value and they eventually remortgage and use the extra money to buy a second rental property. At this point, they begin to generate enough income from their property portfolio and surplus income to cover two months of normal living expenses. That allows them to take two months of unpaid leave each year which, coupled with their annual two weeks’ holiday, means they can now spend ten weeks each year on mission trips in the Amazon.
Ben and Karen now have a money-rich, time-rich lifestyle and this is, of course, reflected in their spending patterns. In fact, they embarked on that spending pattern the moment they traded in their expensive cars. It may have taken several years but their family’s move to a time-rich lifestyle was inevitable – as sure as night follows day.
In this story, Ben and Karen did not pursue riches; they pursued a Godly vision and exercised financial wisdom in pursuit of that goal. In the end, they were no better off financially than they had been in the beginning. The size of their income had not increased. Only the source of their income had changed, albeit slightly.
However, their family has moved from a time-poor to a time-rich paradigm. By exercising financial wisdom and keeping the vision before them, Ben and Karen are now living out God’s plan for their lives!