In order to access our full wealth, we need to be willing to look beyond what money can measure. This isn’t quite as counterintuitive as it might sound.

Who says riches have to be financial?

Who says you have to own something to enjoy it?

For instance, what is your breath worth? I mean, what would you pay to keep it? It’s priceless, isn’t it? But it’s also free.
Money isn’t nothing. It matters, and what we do with it matters. To be financially poor can be a cause of great suffering and evil. But unless we learn to think outside the pound/dollar signs, we’ll never get free of consumerism.

As the saying goes, “The best things in life aren’t things.”

One advantage of nonfinancial riches is that they can be shared without diminishing them. A piece of music can be shared with one person, 10 people, or tens of thousands. But this doesn’t necessarily reduce the pleasure each person gets. It’s like laughter—the more it is shared, the more it is enjoyed.

So what are these nonfinancial riches?

Let’s start with life. Don’t believe a word of the travel adverts. You don’t have to book life; you’re living it now. And to experience this most amazing, scary, wondrous journey you didn’t have to pay a penny. It’s a gift.

You exist. And, wait for it…you still exist. From second to second, you keep on existing. But why? There isn’t a single scientific law to account for the fact that you are still here. You just are. And the same is true for the entire universe. All its atomic energies and chemical balances and physical principles are working now, just like they were five minutes ago, all the way back to the very beginning (which we can’t explain either). We can’t find a scientific reason for this. It just is.

The whole universe is one ginormous fluke of ever-increasing improbability.

Or, alternatively, it rests moment by moment on the generosity of a Giver.

Of the two possibilities, I choose option b.

You exist. And you exist as “you,” a unique and irreplaceable person. This is the gift of your self, your soul. There’s nothing as important as this. You could accept the entire global oil revenues of the last hundred years in trade for it, and you’d be worse off.

Or, as Jesus put it, “What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?”

So life is a gift. Sometimes we can’t really enjoy the gift because of pain or poverty (or, for that matter, because of busyness or selfishness). But the gift remains. And if there’s one secret to receiving it well, it’s learning to count our blessings from zero up rather than counting down from infinity.

Your body is part of your riches. Your capacity to touch and move and create and giggle and dance and rest. OK, my capacity to dance isn’t going to make anyone rich, but you get the idea. Your nonfinancial assets receive second-by-second deposits from your five senses. For instance, what an amazing privilege it is to be able to see. Just the experience of sight itself—to have access to every kind of shape and shade, to be able to connect so clearly with the world around us. And if we have the gift of sight, isn’t it incredible what we are able to wonder at?

There’s the glory of nature. Life in all its bizarre and bewildering beauty. Sunrises, cloudscapes, rattlesnakes, gazelles, oak trees, teardrops, fingerprints, early morning mists, midnight stars. We don’t own any of this (even if we think we own part of it, we don’t). But we can enjoy it.

And we can encounter it with other people. Love is a gift (what is that worth?). Company is a gift. Community is a gift. Over the centuries we’ve come to benefit from wisdom to understand the world. We have culture to celebrate it. And we have language to try to express all these privileges (as far as that’s possible).

Try, just try, to put a price on all of this.

Or even one bit of it.

Can you see the bottom line increasing? Can you see how rich you are?

The fact that you don’t own any of the above doesn’t stop it enriching your life. The fact that it’s “out there” in the world and not stashed away in a private bank account makes no difference. A 17th-century poet, Thomas Traherne, expressed all this perfectly, using his gift of language (which is also our gift, of course, because we get to read his words):

“Your enjoyment of the World is never right, till you so esteem it, that everything in it, is more your treasure than a King’s exchequer full of Gold and Silver…

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world…

“Till you more feel it than your private estate, and are more present in the hemisphere, considering the glories and the beauties there, than in your own house: Till you remember how lately you were made, and how wonderful it was when you came into it: and more rejoice in the palace of your glory, than if it had been made but today morning.”

Our Financial Riches
I read a great book on worry once. It told the true story of a young sailor in 1926. During naval exercises, he had to set up a floating target for warships to use as nighttime firing practice. All began well, he set out with others to prepare the target. Unfortunately his forgetful comrades then sailed off without him, leaving him stranded.

So there he was, stuck in the middle of the ocean on a decoy boat, waiting to be blown out of the water by his own navy. He could do nothing all night but cling to the mast in the terrifying darkness while high-velocity shells blazed past his ears. Things were not looking great. At one point he passed out through sheer horror.

Imagine that happening to you, said the book. And then if you were worried about something in your own life, it’s unlikely to seem that bad!

The naval officer survived, by the way. Every shell missed.

Perspective is a powerful thing.

Our riches are not just those that all humans share. They are also, for most of us, the riches of privilege. But often we don’t stand back to get a good perspective on this.

Think about ancient kings for a minute. What did they actually have?

We know they enjoyed nightly entertainment. And a few other things: luxury bathing, fine wine (by the standards of the day), spices from around the world (if times were good) and time to reflect on the wonders of nature.

Is that so much richer than our lifestyle today?

Don’t we have access to many of these privileges? Next time you’ve got a night to yourself, try this out. Enjoy a hot shower, crack open a bottle of Chardonnay, get in some exotic potato chips and watch a quality nature programme. And think to yourself: This is royal. I live like a monarch.

OK, they also had vast marauding armies, concubines and the tribute of nations.

But they didn’t have Velcro or Pop-Tarts. You win some; you lose some.

There was once a rich young man who came to see Jesus, but left disappointed “because he had great wealth.” I used to read about him and think, “Boy, he must have been rich. I’m glad I’m not that rich; otherwise it might keep me from following Jesus.”
Then one day I realized: Hold on, how rich was he? Did he have hot and cold running water and round-the-clock refrigeration? Did he have advanced health care? What was the extent of his great wealth?

Camels. He had camels. Probably. And a house with several rooms (boy, that’s real luxury). Maybe some fields and servants. But not the modern amenities many of us enjoy. I mean, he walked away sad; he didn’t drive away sad!

In many ways, we are richer than him.

We are richer than most people in history, our distant ancestors, and our recent forebears. We buy about three times as much as our grandparents did at our stage of life and about 70 percent more than our parents.

And we are richer than most people on the planet today.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75 percent of this world.

If you have money in the bank and in your wallet or purse and spare change in a dish somewhere, you are among the top 8 percent of the world’s wealthy.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million others who have.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than more than two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.8
How do I ever forget all this?

I never used to describe myself as rich. Comfortable, maybe, but not rich. Now rich is exactly the adjective I would choose.

We are rich.

But this is a good thing. The richer we are, the harder we are to sell to. If we are already satisfied, we don’t have to become a customer.

Notes:
Some people argue about whether the universe “proves” God or not. I think this misses the point. The universe isn’t an argument; it’s a gift. Insisting on irrefutable evidence that God created the universe is like taking a birthday present back to the shop and demanding to see proof of purchase. As the philosopher Albert Borgmann says, “Creation is donation not causation.” Power Failure (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), 73.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations (1908; repr.; New York: Cosimo, 2007), 17, 19-20.

See Gillian Butler and Tony Hope, Manage Your Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 177-78. The original story is told by Philip Wakeham (“Living Target,” in Seamen and the Sea, R. Hope, ed. [London: George Harrap Co., 1965]).

Cited in J. John and Mark Stibbe, Box of Delights (Oxford: Monarch, 2001), 151.

Mark Powley is an associate pastor and has spoken and written articles on topics of interest to the emergent generation. He has a B.A. from the University of Nottingham and a Certificate for Theology Graduates from the University of Oxford. He lives with his wife and three sons in Hammersmith, United Kingdom.