An unstaffed air control tower and 42 million hungry Americans

The ongoing US government shutdown is the longest full shutdown in US history and the second-longest of any kind. Among its consequences:

• At Hollywood Burbank Airport in California, the air traffic control tower was recently left unstaffed for six hours, forcing pilots to communicate among themselves to avoid incidents when taxiing to and from the runway.
• More than eight thousand US flights have been delayed as shutdown-related air traffic control absences persist.
• Forty-two million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) will go without their SNAP benefits beginning this Saturday.
• Federal funding will also stop flowing to programs that fund education, health, and nutrition services for more than eight hundred thousand children under the age of six.

In other financial news, Amazon is preparing to lay off up to thirty thousand corporate workers as the company plans mass automation. UPS disclosed yesterday that it has cut forty-eight thousand management and operations positions. And Axios reports that employers are already scaling back hiring because of AI.

October 29 is an annual reminder that financial prosperity is promised to no one. This day in 1929 will forever be known as Black Tuesday, the collapse of the stock market that helped produce the Great Depression.

However, financial uncertainty need not steal our joy. Happiness is based on happenings; joy is a “fruit” of the Spirit regardless of conditions (Galatians 5:22). And the harsher the conditions, the greater our joy can be.

Here’s how.

How money can make you happier

In And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, historian Jon Meacham describes in detail the poverty in which our nation’s greatest president grew up. Lincoln’s father struggled to provide for their family; his mother died when he was nine years old. He worked as a farmer, a ferryman, and a store clerk. His time in a school classroom was limited to less than a year.

Lincoln said of himself, “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.”

His background helps explain his passionate commitment to Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal.” A year after Lincoln was elected president, he praised this assertion as “giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” He knew that, with his humble origins, in no country but America could he have become the leader of that country.

But while the Founders declared and defended our equal and “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they couched them in secular terms in a secular Constitution. The word “God” nowhere appears in the document; it mentions “religion” only to prohibit religious tests for office, prevent the establishment of a national religion, and defend religious liberty.

Here’s the problem: the “pursuit of happiness” as an end rather than a means turns out to be a self-defeating exercise.

Social scientist Arthur C. Brooks cites research in his latest Atlantic article that shows how materialistic values are negatively correlated with overall life satisfaction, mood, self-appraisal, and physical health. However, they are positively associated with depression, anxiety, compulsive buying, and risky behaviors. He summarizes: “Money can make you happier, but only if you don’t care about it.”

Pursuing happiness makes us unhappy; pursuing service makes us significant.

Four practical responses

This Halloween week, we’re considering Satan and his strategies. In response to financial need, the devil wants us to doubt God, prioritize the temporal, choose greed over character, and thus damage our witness to the world (cf. Acts 5:1–11).

Our Father wants us to do just the opposite:

Trust God. One way the Lord redeems our needs is by using them to show us the depth of our need for his provision. Only when I admit that “I am weak” can I say “I am strong” in Christ (2 Corinthians 12:10). When we seek and follow his lead, then work as he works, he is “able to make all grace abound to you” (2 Corinthians 9:8; cf. Philippians 4:19).

Prioritize the eternal. I once heard a pastor say he had never seen a U-Haul attached to a hearse. Life is like the game of Monopoly: when it is over, the pieces go back into the box. As C. T. Studd noted, “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” Randy Alcorn would agree: “What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.”

Choose character over greed. We don’t know the strength of our faith until it is tested. We can say we would never cheat on our taxes or steal from our employer, but if we truly need the money that such sins would produce, we discover the depth of our commitment. When temptation comes, turn it immediately to your Lord and claim his victorious grace (1 Corinthians 10:13).

Elevate your witness. The prophet Habakkuk authored one of my favorite declarations in Scripture:

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lᴏʀᴅ; I will take joy in the God of my salvation (Habakkuk 3:17–18).

He could therefore testify: “Gᴏᴅ, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places” (v. 19). Such a testimony in times of plenty is unremarkable; in times of need, it is transformative.

My grocery store friend

I have become friends with a man who works at our local grocery store. When I first met him, I could sense the joy of the Lord in his countenance and the peace of God in his heart. When we see each other, we bump fists (he has to keep his hands sanitary to do his work) and tell each other we’re praying for each other.

Not long ago, he shared with me that he and his wife were going through a time of great financial struggle and asked me to pray for him. I did and I have. I saw him again this week, and his smiling spirit spoke again to my spirit. I asked how things were going. Not better, he confided. But then he grinned and quoted Job:

“Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15).

In whom will you “hope” today?

Quote for the day:

“I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.” —Martin Luther

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