Playing With Someone Else’s Money

“Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” (Matthew 5:42). John D Rockefeller might be the wealthiest man to ever live. It’s said that one time a reporter asked him how much money was enough, and he said, “Just a little bit more.” From the very poorest to the very richest, we have all come up short. We have all felt the sting of not having everything that we need or want. Perhaps some of us have felt it more keenly and more often than others, but all of us know what it’s like to have to beg - whether it’s for money or time or respect or love. “Are we not all beggars?” King Benjamin asks. “Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind? And behold, even at this time, ye have been calling on his name, and begging for a remission of your sins. And has he suffered that ye have begged in vain? Nay; he has poured out his Spirit upon you, and has caused that your hearts should be filled with joy, and has caused that your mouths should be stopped that ye could not find utterance, so exceedingly great was your joy. And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye ought to impart of the substance that ye have one to another.” (Mosiah 4:19-21). Even if we’re not offering our help because it’s the noble thing or the decent thing or the right thing to do, then we should at least give to those that ask because we know exactly what it feels like to beg and to be turned away. I hate, hate, hate asking people for a ride. I’m not sure why I get so hung up on the issue, but I do. But because of this, I almost never turn down someone asking for a ride, even if a lot of times I should, because I know how crappy I feel when I have to ask someone for a ride. Whether we want to admit it or not, we owe everything we have, even each and every breath we take, to our Heavenly Father. However self-made we are, however much we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, however convinced we are that we are an island unto ourselves, we have begged and borrowed all of it from our Father. When we let go of the illusion that we own or deserve anything that we have, it becomes much easier to give freely, since none of it was really ours to begin with. One of my favorite quotes from the 1994 movie Maverick, is when Jodie Foster’s character Annabelle Branson, who stole or swindled nearly all of the $25,000 buy in to the Winner Takes All Poker game, after she loses her last chip and gets kicked out of the game, she says, “I’ll just pretend I was playing with someone else’s money.” If we stop thinking of our time, our talents and our resources as uniquely and unequivocally our own, and start thinking of them as being merely borrowed from our Heavenly Father, then it no longer hurts so much to offer them freely to those in need. When we look at it like that, we’re not giving them our gifts, but rather helping our Heavenly Father make sure that His gifts are placed where they’ll do the most good. If we are struggling to overcome the temptation to turn away those who would borrow from us, let’s stop pretending that the money was ever really ours in the first place and acknowledge the real truth of the situation that we have been playing with someone else’s money this whole time. Then it doesn’t matter because we can’t lose what was never really ours to begin with.