MORE THAN JUST MONEY
By Jason Law
Lasting positive change can only come from within when we discover more deeply about ourselves, including our weaknesses, and start to take proactive decisions to change. That’s the essence of what participants learned at the 2018 January intake of MoneyLife financial management course.
Prosperity Tissa joined the Bible-based course, which recently ended, during a difficult time in her life when her relative was hospitalised.
“MoneyLife showed me that the Bible has advice for every decision in my life, and this fills me with hope, especially during difficult times. One of the most encouraging things was learning from the other participants and knowing I was not going through my problems alone.”
She added, “I used to give things to others a lot but I did not put much thought into them. I learned about giving premeditatedly, praying about our gifts before giving them.”
When Tsu Ee joined the course, she thought it was just another one about savings and investment. She was pleasantly surprised to find that the course was also about an encounter with God and drawing close to Him.
“I learned about spiritual values such as saving and giving generously,” Tsu Ee shared. “Throughout the whole course, every week, I continued to learn something new and the sharing from the others was very inspiring.”
Learning to receive
A comprehensive course brings into the discussions related issues such as how to use your finances effectively, the real problem of debt and how to deal with it, and how to find joy through work. More importantly is bringing all that they had learnt through the lens of the Kingdom of God to see deeper spiritual truths.
Among these are understanding the hope of Christ and the purpose of investment according to His calling, what the Bible says about saving and why it is important to start young, and discovering the spiritual meaning of receiving and giving.
Mary Chan had no problem in giving but through the course, she learned about receiving! She recounted how difficult it was to receive when God sent people to bless her financially or when she was struggling alone with restructuring her workplace and people offered help.
From the course, Mary learned to be humble and be willing to receive. She illustrated her lesson about receiving in an incident. One day while she was getting out of her car to pick up her grandson from school, she felt ‘nudged’ to take a sunshade along. She was puzzled as she could just take the two umbrellas in her car. Nevertheless, she obeyed. As she was walking back to her car with her grandson, it started drizzling. She saw a boy waiting for his transport and promptly gave him the sunshade. A week later, on a rainy day, Mary saw the same boy and his friends huddling under that sunshade. “If that boy had not taken the sunshade, he would not have been able to shelter his friends from the rain,” she said.
MoneyLife Malaysia’s founder Tan Yoke Tee concluded, “There are people who make decisions without knowing why they made them. Others know the decisions they should make but sit on them. And there are others who do things with good intention but without the correct understanding. In order to make the right decisions, we need to understand ourselves and see how God sees us. Ultimately, that’s how the MoneyLife course helps participants to think through these. It’s not just about financial management.”
MoneyLife is affiliated with Crown Ministries Asia. To find out more, visit their page at www.crown.org or write to tanyoketee@gmail.com
Asian Beacon: Jul – Sep 2018 (Vol 50 #3, p33)
