Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon

I’m broke. Money is an issue of: making it, spending it, wanting it and not having it.

My girlfriend and I live together, so the bulk of our income goes into the apartment. Rent, food, light bulbs, toilet paper, and the things you need to keep your house from looking condemned.

Before I moved in with my girlfriend, I had disposable cash coming out of my ears. I had three or four checks sitting in my dresser drawer not cashed because I didn’t need them for anything. Those were the days I was living at home; where I didn’t have to pay for anything, and I could buy three pairs of Nikes without thinking twice. But now I can barely buy my favorite kind of mustard with out checking the price.

Thankfully, when my girlfriend and I moved in to our apartment a dollar store opened just down the street. At first, we didn’t think anything of it. We figured we would go there every once and awhile to get tape or some other miscellaneous product you would find at a dollar store.

After going in and finding out that they had a whole food section and discovering that everything was truly a buck, we began to think, “Well, maybe we can come here just to pick up odds and ends,” just to round out a meal or two. After spending hundreds of dollars at a regular grocery store, and knowing that if we had to buy food in this way we wouldn’t be so broke. The dollar store became our only hope. Now it has become our main source of food.

I feel money, or the lack there of, is a very difficult subject to approach. It can be an embarrassing topic especially when we’re being bombarded every day with things we should want: cars and houses and other expensive things. Seeing on the news that there is recession looming, actually getting those things is becoming more and more unrealistic.

If you watch music videos you have seen a lot of the things you will never see in real life, let alone own and that’s the truth for the majority of us. But still, we want those things. I’ve never been able to relate to rappers who rap about how much money they have, ‘cause I’ve been broke all my life. So, someone talking about his chromed out Yamaha is totally out of my reality. That main fact is one of the reasons I searched for an alternative point of view when it comes to music. It’s easier for me to identify with someone rapping about how hard it is to meet expectations and the struggle of everyday life like P.O.S than with Rick Ross talking about his speedboat or his chinchilla hat or whatever.

I was raised to believe that the pursuit of money is the root of all-evil, but it is still a very necessary evil. Being raised as a Christian I was also taught that the greatest on earth will be the least in heaven and the least on earth will be the greatest in heaven; Because, if you do exceedingly well here, you have already gotten your reward. I always had trouble with that one growing up. It always bugged me ‘cause I wanted to be successful on both plains. Plus why did people pray for wealth if it just meant you would end up a second rate angel?

Jesus himself said ‘sell all you have and give to the poor’. But you see pastors in million dollar churches, in thousand dollar suits, preaching to a congregation of people that are in church to pray to God to lift their financial burdens.

I say I want to be a good servant and humbly follow God by obeying his word, though I still have my own dreams of a loft on the top floor of a high rise or big fancy TV.

I guess there is a big difference between being poor by default and poor by choice ‘cause if I had a choice I would have those things even though I know they will just make it harder for me to focus.

It’s very confusing to me because I want to be a successful writer, I want to write things that will connect to a lot of people and hopefully help them in any way I can, and I pray for that. But if I do gain any type of success it would most likely bring money, as well hurt my chances at a happy afterlife. But I believe God has given me the gift to write and help people, so why would he give me something if I’m not supposed to use it or why would he give me a desire to create a community of like minded people where the necessary byproduct of my success in that would be money? It seems like their can’t be one without the other.

I feel like this is a dichotomy I will be dealing with for a long time.
—Donny Lumpkins