Is the recession hitting you?

Let me do a six-months-later check-in.  It was perhaps six months ago that the prospect of a serious recession hit most of our screens, and we commented on it on this blog then and a few times since.  I’m curious if you (or those you love) are feeling the effects of it in any particular way, and, if so, what you’ve learned as you’ve responded to it. 

On the one hand, our family still has food on the table and our church still stands.  On the other hand, our one significant investment in the market—college funds for our kids—got hit as hard as the rest of the market.  One day I found myself praying and saying to God, “Well, there are worse things than not being able to go to a relatively expensive college…or, if it gets worse, to college at all.  You’ve done great things through many people who haven’t been to college.” And I felt God interrupt me to suggest a different formulation, namely that I invite God personally to send my kids to their ideal college—or lack thereof—and let God sort out the means by which that could happen. 

That helped me understand yet again the trickiness of my experience of faith.  Oh yes, I thought, I’m depending on God for all things, including my kids’ futures.  When their college funds were heftier, evidently my faith could drift that direction.  When the funds are leaner, that option falters. 

This week’s Time Magazine includes lots of interviews with folks about their experience of the recession, and it throws lots of poll numbers our way about how Americans are thinking about it.  Their summary article ends on a surprisingly graceful note.

No one wishes for hardship. But as we pick through the economic rubble, we may find that our riches have buried our treasures. Money does not buy happiness; Scripture asserts this, research confirms it. Once you reach the median level of income, roughly $50,000 a year, wealth and contentment go their separate ways, and studies find that a millionaire is no more likely to be happy than someone earning one-twentieth as much. Now a third of people polled say they are spending more time with family and friends, and nearly four times as many people say their relations with their kids have gotten better during this crisis than say they have gotten worse.

A consumer culture invites us to want more than we can ever have; a culture of thrift invites us to be grateful for whatever we can get. So we pass the time by tending our gardens and patching our safety nets and debating whether, years from now, this season will be remembered for what we lost, or all that we found.

Have you been learning things during this recession?