David: Two days ago I pulled off at North Avenue, which is a main thoroughfare, to make a quick stop at a hardware store to get some thistle seed for our bird feeder. There on the near edge of a restaurant parking lot was a woman with a homemade sign. Couldn’t read it because the letters were too small, at least for my eyes, so at my first chance I turned the car around and that’s when I first noticed that there were also two small children with her. By her clothes I knew she was from another culture and she was requesting money. So I pulled over to give her something.

Karen: Oh, I’m glad you did and I believe this is a scene we’re going to face time and time again as we go farther into this financial collapse. Did anyone else stop? Did you notice anyone else stop?

David: Not while I was there anyway, but I didn’t have a choice because I knew we were going to do this podcast on what the Bible has to say about the poor and. ..

Karen: Oh no, really? Did you make that connection?

David: Yeah, I did.

Karen: So God kind of set you up, huh?

David: I think so.

Karen: To see if your money was where your mouth was. But were you generous?

David: Well, you’re being kind of personal now. I was, okay.

Karen: Exactly. How generous were you?

David: I was generous. I gave her $20. I figured with two kids $5 wouldn’t go very far and such and she was very, very appreciative.

Karen: Oh honey, that’s sweet.

Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

Karen: Giving money to someone in need is hardly a new experience for us. Early on in our lives, together as a couple and as a ministering couple, we served for 10 years in the near west neighborhood in the city of Chicago. Now that time, that was one of the poor areas of the city. In fact, it had been burnt out a lot of it after the riots that accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. So having people ask for help is not something out of the ordinary for us and for many of our listeners, I’m sure as well.

David: Yeah, you’re going to see people asking for help just about wherever you go from our experience over the years, Karen. I’d like to begin this visit by making a few personal observations. They’re not from books we’ve read or courses we’re taking. They’re just kind of reflections from our own living. I would say that debt occurs in many, many different ways. It’s not always because someone has been foolish or just extravagant and spending, although that is a problem for a number of people.

Karen: And I think that’s the normal sort of stereotype that we impose upon people who we realize are in debt. And sometimes that is right. There have been extravagant expenditures or living beyond one’s means or buying home that was really too expensive because people want. There’s children to go to schools in that kind of a neighborhood. But that’s not always the only reason why people find themselves in debt.

David: Sometimes it’s because of a health issue. There’s a huge hospital bill. We know what that’s like.

Karen: Oh, we do. I was sick one summer, starting in February and going all the way through August. I lost 43 pounds and no one could diagnose what was wrong. And so when they went back to do laparoscopic surgery to explore what was happening, they thought maybe my esophagus had gotten twisted or there was a too tight juncture between the esophagus and the stomach, they discovered that there was this candida covering over the mesh. Long story short, the hospital bill for all of that medical attention eventually had 11 doctors, on my case. It was $86, 000.

David: Oh, we don’t have $86, 000 to cover.

Karen: No, but we do have Medicare with supplemental insurance.

David: That’s wonderful, but a lot of people don’t.

Karen: And a lot of people don’t, but Medicare paid what they thought all of that was worth, which was $11, 000. You and I had nothing that we owed, but if we had not had that kind of insurance, we would have had a bill for $86, 000. What does the average person do with that? We know there are millions of people who don’t have insurance who are not in cover. And so you’re just hapless in the face of this sort of medical. It’s kind of a collusion.

David: Insurance is not only in terms of health insurance, we just heard in terms of a gentleman in Chicago where the looting was.

Karen: On Michigan Avenue. He had recent looting on Michigan Avenue.

David: He had a watch shop. This was his whole livelihood. And he was wiped out.

Karen: I had watched as he hit, and that was his future retirement. That was his living, and he had no insurance. He was a man from another country. He would never have dreamed that a Michigan Avenue store would be looted and all of that stuff taken. So he’s in terrible trouble right now.

David: There are people who are taken advantage of. In fact, individuals our age are warned all the time of scams that go on.

Karen: Yeah, AARP magazine, which is the magazine for senior citizens. It doesn’t have an issue that comes out where it doesn’t have a column or warning about scams that are being perpetrated on people of our age. So you really want to watch any phone call that comes your way. Or you just, there was a phone solicitation last night from the fire association, and you wouldn’t let me give to it. And you were right. We don’t know if it was just a scam that someone had dreamed up. So yeah, we just have to be careful.

David: Fires, floods, all these things.

Karen: Natural disasters are another cause of putting people in it. You lose everything, and you don’t maybe have enough insurance to cover it, and you can.

David: And I would add an honest attempt to do right that turns out to be disastrous. Let me just give our story. I don’t want to go into great detail.

Karen: This is why we’re talking about this topic today, because we really do understand the burden and pressure of debt.

David: But I was saying that an observation is that debt doesn’t occur always because somebody’s been a spendthrift or whatever. We were on air, our big thing during the course of the year, which involved thousands of churches, was called the 50-day Spiritual Adventure. We had to get ready for it by printing large numbers of materials. We had pastors’ conferences to train these different individuals. It amounted to thousands and thousands of dollars.

Karen: 600, 000 dollars.

David: It was a big sum of money.

Karen: A year just to set that up and get it going and get it launched and get it printed and get it out by mail.

David: It always came back because the adventure had grown over a period of a decade, and we were very confident in what was going on. We were anticipating everything except we didn’t know that at the wrong time in the year, just when things were beginning to unfold, we would be accused of being, which it’s almost ludicrous now to say it, because it’s so far from anything one would imagine, we were accused by extreme right-wing people of being new age. And all of a sudden, this spread like wildfire. Fortunately, it was prior to the days when you have internet.

Karen: social media to advance rumors or gossips or critiques like this, or to do even worse to spread lies, outright lies.

David: All over, churches would call in and say, we have read that. We need you to explain to us. And by the way, we’re canceling our order to be involved in the adventure this year. It was like all of a sudden, the bottom drought, the powder, everything.

Karen: Our phone room was getting a thousand phone calls a day. I mean, it was just an extraordinary tsunami that hit us.

David: I didn’t know how we would solve this. And then I thought, “Wow, I have good personal credit. I think what I’m going to do, we will make it through this. I will put the bills for the printing and the advertising and the travel for the pastors to be taught. I’ll put it on my personal credit cards.”

Karen: We’ll max out our credit cards with this.

David: We can underwrite this. And it will all come back again because it always has. Unfortunately, it didn’t all come back. And eventually the ministry just totally collapsed.

Karen: We had to close it down.

David: Yeah. But I still had those debts. I had over a quarter of a million dollars in debt on my personal credit cards. So I thought I was doing the noble right thing, but I was making a dumb decision. If I went back, I think that probably wasn’t very smart.

Karen: Knowing now what you know about it, but I think you did make a decision that was the best decision you could make at that time.

David: So basically this is just saying that debt occurs in many different ways. Another observation I would make is that it is a load that is far heavier than I ever imagined. Karen, when I realized how much that was and as those bills came in month after month, I was terrorized.

Karen: Well, you can’t get out from under a load of debt. You think about it during the day. First thing, you wake up.

David: It’s like somebody straps a 40 pound cement block on your back and you’re conscious of it all day long.

Karen: If you’re restless sleep, you turn and toss because of it. You don’t know how you’re going to solve things.

David: I found myself, this is a while back, so I can talk about it now. I didn’t want to go to the mailbox because I knew what was going to be in that mailbox. I didn’t want to answer the phone because I don’t think the companies themselves, they hire debt collectors and they’re good at putting the pressure on you. It was horrible. I didn’t even want to be alive. I just wanted to vanish somehow.

Karen: All this to say that we truly empathize with those people who are experiencing the similar load of debt and they have no clue or idea as far as how they’re going to get out of it.  But not only do we empathize with it because we’ve had this debt scenario in our lives, we also know that God cares about the poor and God cares about debt.

David: So we should probably just finish that story because in his providence, God provided some incredible friends for us.

Karen: It was an extraordinary thing. We didn’t know where the money was going to come from if we’d ever be able to pay off this debt. So we had remortgaged our house.

David: I had a call from a friend. He said, how much money do you owe? And I said to him, it’s about $250, 000. Now that was a lie. I was too embarrassed to tell him what it really was.

Karen: $270, 000.

David: He said, “Well, I will pray with you about it.” And I didn’t think about it anymore. It was a nice call, but it ended and he sent me a check for $250, 000. It wasn’t to the ministry. It was to me personally. I can’t believe anyone would do that. And carrying the sigh of relief I had from that, the cement block was off my back because there was a way out. But there are a lot of people who don’t have that happen.

Karen: Yes, that’s right.

David: And they have carried that for years and years and years. And it’s multiplied problems because it means the car is gone. Probably it means you can’t get to work. Here are a lot of people who have been put out of their homes. And then what do you do? Do you go find relatives? You know, that may work.

Karen: Shelter that you can stay there for a week or so.

David: You actually move into what I would call magical thinking. I have never bought a lottery ticket.

Karen: But you thought about it, I bet.

David: I thought, I don’t know. Lord, if you would help me, I don’t know how to pick that number. But if you would help me, we could together get out of this. Well, that didn’t happen. But I think people are desperate. Sometimes it becomes a learned lifestyle. People say, yeah, they’re never going to be different. And I think that’s possible. That lady who was asking for money, she could have been a cheat. She could have had a neat sports car about four blocks away. But that’s not usually the case, I don’t think. I think debt is a very, very difficult thing.

Here’s one of the wonderful things I’ve learned about debt. Debt can’t block us from the concern of God. Does anybody really care? And the answer to that is yes, God cares. Now, I’m going to go to scripture. You have something you want to say.

Karen: Well, you do your scripture first, and then I’ll just tell about what I did this morning. And I searched through scripture.

David: This is from Deuteronomy. That’s a kind of strange book. And what does Deuteronomy mean? Rather than do that, let me just say, Deuteronomy is basically the words of Moses to his people. He can’t go into the Promised Land. They’ve been in the wilderness all these years. Because of something he has done, the Lord said no. But he’s instructing the people, his last words to the people. And this is from Deuteronomy, chapter 15. I’m going to cut some of the words, just because of time and keeping interest to people.

At the end of every seven years, you must cancel debts. This is how it has been done. Every creditor shall cancel the loan he has made to his fellow Israelites. He shall not require payment from his fellow Israelite or brother, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your brother owes you. However, there shall be no poor among you. For in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you. If only you fully obey the Lord your God, and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the Lord your God has given you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your poor brother. Rather be open-handed and freely lend him whatever he needs. Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart. Then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed towards your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.

So that makes that 20 bucks look pretty, pretty small, doesn’t it? But this is what the Lord says.

Karen: David, while you were looking at some scriptures and we’ve gone over this podcast a little bit, I went to my computer and pulled down a compendium of verses on the poor. I have seven pages of verses. I’m thinking that there are people who are listening to us who are facing this problem themselves. And we’re talking about how debt happens in a whole variety of ways. And we know there’s going to be more people facing this because of the economic collapse during these days. So what I would suggest is that if they can do the same thing I did, just put in passages on the poor as a search in my search engine.

And then I had these seven pages come up. But one of the things that a person who is in debt could do is to take their Bible and a concordance and put in the passages, the poor or debt, and then just begin to go through the scriptures and see the compassion and mercy and tenderness and concern God has for those who are poor and powerless, who have debt. I mean, it’s just the kind of study that revolutionizes your thinking. And you come away thinking, oh my goodness, I had no idea that there were all these verses about the poor caring for the poor, giving to the poor, including the outcast. I mean, it is just huge. It’s a huge theology. 14:46

David: Cancel debt every seven years.

Karen: Cancel debt every seven years.

David: That’s what God says. I mean, that’s a huge thing. Now, I don’t know if the nation ever did that. And from what I’ve read as I’ve studied this, nobody knows. So it’s kind of interesting.

Karen: But it was God’s desire the whole time.

David: And it was very much in the consciousness of the people. This is Moses. So you got Moses and Joshua, then you got the judges, and then you have all the kings, you know, Saul, David, and all of them, and then you have the captivity of the land. They go into exile, you have Babylon and Persia and finally you have the return to the land. And that’s under Nehemiah, which is really interesting because when Nehemiah comes to kind of head the people, he said, we’re going to make a covenant and we’re going to live the way God wants us to live. And he says we need to keep the Sabbath. And as soon as that is finished, he says every seventh year we will forgo working the land and will cancel all debts. So all these generations, it’s in the minds of the people. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

Karen: The Israelites.

David: I don’t know if they did it with Nehemiah, but he said to them.

Karen: As long as he was alive, I think they probably…

David: At least they were aware that’s what they were supposed to do. That’s Old Testament. If I get into the New Testament, I think of Jesus as he’s introduced his ministry. We’ve gone through the fasting for the 30 days and praying. And then it says, he returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. And he goes into the synagogue in Nazareth and he reads from the prophet Isaiah that was handed to him. And this is the passage.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me and he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

That’s exactly what he does. Now he talks about being born again as well. But in terms of his message, he is not only saying that this is good news for the poor. He is healing people but he is not charging them. He’s not an $84, 000 debt. So this is Jesus. It’s very interesting. In fact, when the Gentile church, when you get into the book of Acts, is developed under the preaching of the Apostle Paul, in Israel they have this meeting of the council to say, is this right that the Gentiles can be Christians? And then they say, okay, this is all right. We give you our affirmation. Just be sure that you are supposed to be concerned for the poor.

Karen: How have we lost that in our country? In our white churches, I guess if you’re in college. I don’t say it as the forefront of preaching.

David: Maybe not.

Karen: I think we’re beginning to see the higher incidents as COVID-19 deaths in these communities of black people or brown people or native Indian people. So that’s raising the consciousness. But our responsibility is to be a primary one. If I’m gathering any conclusions from squirters, a primary one of being concerned for the poor, the powerless, the oppressed, and those who have debt.

David: I was going to say that it just does my heart good when you see churches either as an individual church or banding together and they give food away. The parking lot will be there and this is money that came through the churches and they bought food with it and now they’re saying, if you have needs, come here. We will minister to those needs. We’re not saying you have to sign up. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to attend the church. We’re just concerned for people who don’t have what they need to meet their daily needs.

Karen: I think that’s one of the most powerful visuals that a culture can have of what God is like and what his concern is like. And I would like to encourage those who are listening to us who have responsibilities in local churches, who have a voice of a kind in local churches, to say what is the theology that’s functioning in us regarding the poor and the powerless and those who are in debt. What during this time do we need to be preparing to do, or do we as an all city church movement, be prepared to do with one another so that we can make sure there’s an umbrella that is put over these people, an umbrella of godly and spiritual protection for them as they work their way through these really rough times.

David: Yeah, we’re never going to solve the problem of the poor. The poor we will always have. But at the same time, we have to be concerned, and that’s one of those things we’re going to have every opportunity for.

Karen: Do I have time just to say one thing about toxic charity? Okay, one of the things I’ve learned as I’ve worked on the board of a worldwide development organization is that charity can be toxic even though it’s well intended. And so there are sometimes when in emergencies we give away, but if you continue to do that over and over again, it can make the people who are in the receiving end ashamed or it can work a lot of negative things in their lives. So we need to struggle.

David: It sets of bad patterns.

Karen: It sets up bad patterns and diminishes their sense of self. So one of the things we need to struggle with in our committees and in our church teams and our governing boards is how do we avoid the toxic charity effect? And that is by empowering poor people and people who are in debt to be a part of the discovery process. We invite them to come and be part of the dialogue. What is the best way to service the needs? In Christian compassion and charity, of course, conserve the needs of the poor who are in our communities. And in that dialogue, they begin to define the ways to do this that are good ways, the ways that don’t develop dependencies, the ways that don’t shame and make people feel funny, but they have to wait for an hour in a line of cars to get some food. So we want to avoid toxic charity too. Just one aside here.

David: So just as an illustration, you might invite the poor to be involved in the process of how would you tell us to give this food out? Is that what you’re saying?

Karen: Yes. And then to be a part of the distribution process as well. So it’s not just them always on the receiving end and they’ll come in with a whole different understanding in a grid of suggestions that most of us wouldn’t even think about because we don’t have to live the lives that they’ve had to live. It’s an extraordinarily powerful process. And the end result is not to do for the poor, is to set up training programs for them, to help them with job skills. Those are the sorts of things that need to happen in a charity that’s not just a dual charity, but one where we’re concerned about empowering the people who have been stuck in these places, but now have means to climb out of them.

David: It’s a huge issue. We’re always going to have the poor. But how do we do the best we can in the name of Jesus? Jesus gave us this prayer, which is the Lord’s prayer that you and I pray, well, pretty close to every day. And there is that line in there that is very interesting. We usually say, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. But I think, again, it comes back into this whole. .. I had a great phone call yesterday, somebody called and said, what are you talking on the podcast about next time? And I said, we’re going to do it on debt and so on. And she said, oh, you know what? Because I told her the experience of the lady in the parking lot. She said, when I go out for groceries, that kind of thing, I just look forward to it so much because I put extra money in my purse. So when I see those people, it gives me great joy to be able to give to them.

Wow, that is really, really neat. The church needs to wrestle with this more and more. There’s an interesting passage here in the Old Testament, and this is a total half the wall reference that I’m going to give, but I want you to picture it in your mind. This is in 1 Samuel. It says in chapter 22, starts the chapter, David. This is before David is king. He’s been running for his life because Saul has been after him. David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adulam. And when his brothers and his father’s household heard about it, they went down to him there. All those who were in distress or in debt or disconnected, gathered around him, and David became their leader. About 400 men were with him.

Karen: So this was David’s mighty men, right? Didn’t they become called mighty men?

David: They were, but I mean, what would you do with 40 people who have absolutely nothing? They haven’t had lunch yet. Who do you think I am? I’m running for my own life.

Karen: Well, I wonder if that isn’t God’s plan to pour us to work among the poor in such a way that we become a band of mighty people for God.

David: Well, that’s a good way to look at it. That’s great. I was kind of thinking, what a horrible thing to predict. I’ve got enough problems already, God.

Karen: Let me close with this one story out of my life. We had paid off all of our debts, but I had friends who were very, very in real financial trouble. And so one of the credit cards companies sent us, one of these offers that entices you, it was zero percentage for a whole year. So I gave them a sizeable check off of that thinking that I could pay that back myself.

David: Okay, we do can play this game. What’s the sizeable check? 25 bucks?

Karen: It was $4, 000 because they needed that money. They didn’t ask me for it either, but I just knew what their financial crisis was. So I sent it to them with great joy, and they were deeply grateful.

David: And I have a no interest loan on a credit card for a year. So I paid it back in increments, you know, bit by bit. Just praying the whole time, Lord, let me just pay this off. There’s a scripture that came to me when I made this decision. It was, those who care for the poor lend to the Lord. I will repay, he says. So I was kind of curious to see if that would even happen. So about two weeks ago, I paid off all of that. Just so grateful that God had given us the funds. Of course, I’m down to nothing again, but it was an act of charity and love. The Lord provided the means by, that wasn’t going, so the bend that 0% card came through. And I am now paid that off as well. I’ve given a gift to them and now paid that off as well. So I think that’s a scripture that works for me.

David:Well, I think all that is very beautiful. Do you have the sentence that we were working with?

Karen: Yeah, I do. What should be done about the problem of debt? This is an issue about which the church should always be grappling. What should be done about the problem of debt? Question mark. This is an issue about which the church should always be grappling.

Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address: hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all lower case letters, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2020 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois, 60187.