Pound Foolish (Windy City Neighbors Book 4) (42 page)

     Harry suddenly stood up, frowning at the cup in his hand. “This coffee’s terrible. Here, let me throw yours out. We’ll make some new.”

     As Harry went over to the sink and began making fresh coffee, Greg said, “So why won’t it work for me?”

     “Ah, now there you go. Remember that question, because I think it’s a very important question.”

     While the coffee brewed, Harry returned to his chair and rested his elbows on the table. “You remember when you wanted me to sell that energy drink for you?”

     “Yeah, SlowBurn. I’m still a distributor. I could cut you in.”

     “No. And my reason’s the same today as I told you then. If I took up something like that just so I could get rich, I’d be penny wise and pound foolish.”

     “What do you mean? I didn’t understand you then, and I don’t now.”

     Harry chuckled. “My mama used to say that to me. ‘Boy, don’t you be penny wise an’ pound foolish!’ What she meant was, when you focus on the small things—the pennies—you can easily overlook the big things to your detriment.” Harry raised his eyebrows and nodded toward Greg as if to say,
“Whaddaya think of that?”

     Greg snorted. “Believe me, Harry, I haven’t been pinching pennies, and I
have
been focusing on making the big bucks. That’s the point. I’ve been trying to go all out for the prosperity God’s supposed to have for me, but I haven’t received any of it.”

     “Uh-huh.” Harry got up and went for the coffee. “You mean you haven’t been bugging your wife about whether she saved fifty cents on the latest sale?”

     “Not at all, never.” But she’d still left him. The thought of it stabbed his heart.

     “I believe you, because I’m sure you’ve been focusing on what seems like big things—stuff like a new house, fancy car, nice boat, maybe a couple of cruises every year, and all the bling you can wear. Right?”

     Greg shrugged. “I don’t go in much for bling, but yeah, I want
real
prosperity. I want to be the head and not the tail, the lender and not the borrower. I want to be on top. That’s where I’ve kept my focus, on the big things.”

     Harry handed him a mug. “Here’s your coffee. I forgot to ask, you take anything in it?”

     “A little milk, if you have it.”

     When Harry returned with the milk and sat down, he repeated Greg’s comment. “‘Head and not the tail . . . lender and not the borrower.’ I seem to remember that’s from the Bible, but wasn’t that a promise to Israel if they would obey God’s commands? But then I’m no theologian, which is why I focus a lot on what Jesus taught, because he was pretty clear when he said, ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.’ That’s what I meant about penny wise and pound foolish. All the necessities of life—where you’ll live, what you’ll eat, the clothes you’ll wear—those aren’t the pounds. They’re actually just the pennies. If you focus on them, you might miss the pounds, the really big stuff.”

     Greg just sat there bewildered. The things he’d been reaching for certainly didn’t seem like pennies. He’d been imagining big-ticket items, things like Pastor Hanson’s Escalade or a condo in Florida. But what was Harry saying—that Escalades, thousand-dollar suits, and personal bodyguards shrank to mere “pennies” when compared to the kingdom of God? He had to admit, Jesus clearly placed the kingdom of God and his righteousness at the top—though if asked to define the kingdom of God, he wasn’t sure he could do it. Pastor Hanson made it sound like the kingdom of God was kinda like Disneyland with all its riches and glory. But maybe that’s not what Jesus meant.

     Harry leaned back. “Does any of that make any sense to you?”

     Greg sighed. “Yeah, when you put it that way, I guess. But I’ve still got fifteen grand hanging out there, and if I lose it . . . well, it might seem like small stuff to you, but to me—”

     “No, no, no. I know it’s not small to you, and it wouldn’t be small to me, but it’s small to God. Remember, he’s a big God. He would have no trouble taking care of you, even if this situation threw you into bankruptcy. Hear what I’m sayin’?”

     Greg snorted and shook his head. “Bankruptcy!” He hadn’t even thought of that. Was that where he was headed? “I still don’t want to go through it.”

     “None of us would. But remember a few minutes ago when I told you to remember your question,
Why won’t it work for me?
”

     “Yeah.”

     “What were you expecting to work?”

     “Oh, I don’t know. God, prayer, believing in faith—all the stuff Pastor Hanson talks about.”

     “That’s what I thought. But seeking God and his kingdom isn’t a program you can
work
like a politician shaking hands to get votes. There may be a connection between faithful and generous giving and God’s blessing on our lives, but he’s no ATM machine where you can key in a prayer with your ‘faith believing’ ID and out comes the money. That’d be like me saying, ‘I talk with my wife so she’ll cook me a good meal.’
Huh
. If she thought that was the only reason I talked to her, she’d let me starve.”

     Greg laughed, releasing a little nervous tension.

     Harry grinned too. “I’m not sayin’ God’s gonna let you starve. But the reason I talk with my wife is because we have a relationship, and we both want it to grow and deepen. I don’t do it to
get
something, even though I know she’s gonna take care me because she loves me. Same thing with God. We can’t
work
him like a genie. The question,
Why won’t it work?
presupposes some kind of a formula or system you can
work
. God’s not like that.”

     Greg heaved a sigh. “Yeah, I hear ya.” The truth of what Harry had been saying was sinking in. “But, man, I still don’t know what to do. I’m in a pretty big mess right now. Even if I agree that trying to twist God’s arm so I could live large wasn’t right, I still gotta think about my family and how to keep from losing my house. I don’t have a source of income right now, you know.”

     Harry shook his head. “Can’t offer you any easy way out on that. This whole idea that the Christian life is supposed to be Easy Street forgets that some of the people in the Bible who were the most qualified to receive such supposed benefits didn’t receive them, at least not in this life. Jesus lived a perfect life of faith, yet he died on a cross. And from what I’ve read, all his disciples except John were martyred. Fact is, a lot of faithful Christians have suffered down through the ages. No, it’s not about ease and luxury. But God did promise to be with us. And he did promise to take care of all those ‘penny’ things we might need to do his work.”

     Greg grasped onto Harry’s last words. “So you think he’s still going to take care of me, even though I’ve made such a mess of things?”

     “Yep, but I don’t know how or what that’ll mean.”

     Greg leaned over the table, head in his hands. “I still don’t know what to do.”

     “Well, if Estelle was here, she’d tell us the first thing to do is pray. You okay with that?”

     Greg nodded and closed his eyes as he felt Harry’s hand on his shoulder. His voice shaking, Greg told God he was sorry he’d made such a mess and asked him to show him what to do to get his family back. Then Harry prayed, asking God to make his presence known to Greg in a powerful way, and especially to restore the relationship between Greg and his wife.

     As they got up from the table, Greg said, “Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.”

     Corky got up from where she’d been lying under the table and walked with them as the two men headed slowly toward the front door. At the top of the stairs leading to the lower level, Harry stopped. “Greg, you keep sayin’ that you don’t know what to do. I hear ya. That’s a man thing. We always feel we gotta do something. But right now, what’s done is done, right? As far as you know, no way to undo that bid?”

     Greg nodded his head.

     “Okay, then here’s my suggestion. Don’t do anything on your computer until Monday morning—”

     “Monday morning!”

     “Right. Don’t check to see if you lost money or won it. Don’t even turn it on. Instead, spend the next three days seeking God and learning to trust him. If you’re like me, you’ll find a ditch on both sides of that path. Your mind will tend to spin out into fear that you’ve lost it all. And at other times you’ll swerve off the path into hope—an unfounded hope, really—that you’re gonna come out of this rich. But I tell ya, man. Resist both. They’re just tempting distractions. Just seek God and the confidence that he’ll be with you no matter what.”

     Greg stared at the floor, trying to imagine how he could do that. The man was right about those ditches. Even as he thought about it, Greg vacillated between fear he’d lost it all and euphoria that he’d be on his way to prosperity.

     “Look”—Harry interrupted his thoughts—“that was just a suggestion. You go on home and pray about it. Do whatever God tells you to do.”

Chapter 42

Greg trudged up his porch steps and tried the front door. Locked. And he’d gone out without his keys. Which meant he’d left the back door unlocked. Good grief. That was stupid. But as he went around to the back and came in, everything seemed the same as he’d left it—including his computer, which was still running in the living room, the screen saver swirling rainbow colors across the screen.

     Harry had said don’t even turn the thing on, but . . . it was already on. A touch of the mouse would bring up the TopOps page and perhaps the answer of whether he’d won or lost . . . if the Internet was back up, that was. He reached out . . .

     Should he do it?

     Greg hesitated. Harry had called his instructions “just a suggestion,” not a big word from the Lord, not some law found in Scripture.

     He reached out again but stopped. He could just switch the computer off. People lost power to their computers all the time from a storm or tripped breaker switch. It wasn’t the way you were supposed to shut down a computer, and you’d lose any unsaved documents. But he didn’t have a half-finished document sitting in the computer’s memory, nothing to lose. Switching it off would merely mean it’d take a little longer to clean itself up the next time he turned it on.

     Why would he do that? Harry said it’d be a chance to seek God and the confidence that God would be with him no matter what. But so what? He could seek God any time. What difference did it make if he knew whether he’d won or lost?

     Greg had been trying to exercise faith—faith that God would prosper him big time, and it’d taken a lot of faith. He’d really believed God was going to make him prosperous! But somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, he began to realize that it took a lot of faith to trust God for what he
didn’t
know. What was that verse from the book of Hebrews he’d memorized years ago?
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Wouldn’t that apply as equally to his hope for prosperity as it did to the hope that God would walk with him through this crisis?

     But suddenly, he saw the difference. One was material wealth—things that would bring pleasure for a time but would ultimately disappear, the kind of treasure Jesus said would rust, be eaten by moths, or get stolen. The other involved a relationship with God, something that could last for eternity.

     He could almost hear the voice in his head: “
So Greg, which is more valuable?”

     That’s what Harry must’ve meant when he said all those enticements Pastor Hanson dangled before his listeners—no matter how big they seemed—were mere “pennies” in comparison to the “pounds” of the kingdom of God. One could be seen all around him, tangible, physical, noticeable . . . while the other would remain unseen, a relationship, a confidence in his heart.

     Greg walked over to the front window and parted the sheer curtains, looking across the street and up a few houses toward the graystone two-flat he’d left not fifteen minutes before, Harry’s words still tumbling around in his head. His neighbor hadn’t been downgrading
faith
, hadn’t been telling him to “face reality” as though the supernatural was a fantasy. He’d been calling Greg to a higher faith.

     Could he do that? Did he believe it? Was it really possible to have the kind of relationship with God that was greater than all Pastor Hanson’s promises of cars and boats and big houses?

     Greg reached out again, not to the mouse but to the power strip, and switched off the computer.

* * * *

Friday night was the pits. Greg didn’t know what to do with himself. He tried to call Nicole at her mother’s, but it went right to an answering machine. “Honey, please give me a call. I’d like to talk to the kids. Are you coming home soon? Just . . . give me a call so we can talk.” But both the house phone and his cell remained silent.

     What did they usually do Friday nights? Nicole sometimes wanted to get a babysitter and go out, but Greg couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that. Not since he’d lost his job at Powersports anyway. Sunday nights they usually had popcorn and root beer floats, and he’d watch a DVD with the kids while Nicole had some personal time.
Man!
He’d even watch
Home Alone
or
The Incredibles
again if the kids were home.

     But as it was, he ended up zoning out in front of the tube watching two straight hours of cop shows and reality TV, and then the ten o’clock news before heading for bed. But when Greg woke the next morning, he felt as if he’d been tossing and turning all night. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head.

     The house was quiet. Too quiet.

     Forcing himself to get up, he headed for the kitchen to make coffee. Still in his pajama trousers and T-shirt, he took a mug out onto the back porch. Sipping his coffee, he tried to get a handle on the feelings tugging at his gut. Harry had been right about the temptations he’d face on either side of the path toward simply trusting God to be with him. One moment he had to fight with fear of a devastating financial loss . . . and five minutes later he was still having fantasies of God making him rich—especially if his bid had been right. But the fear had his gut in knots. After all, he’d been the one who got himself into such a desperate financial mess, so perhaps it was his feeling of guilt over such recklessness that pitched him most often into the fear ditch.