Financial success is a difficult destination to reach. Happiness is an elusive state of being. Why is it so darn hard to have one, if not both of these?

There’s a silent, deadly monster roaming in your backyard eating your money and mauling your happiness. It’s time to face it and kill it. The monster is GREED.

No–wait! That can’t be! I’m not GREEDY. I’m broke. I don’t have a million dollar penthouse. I don’t own ten factories that I outsourced to foreign countries at the expense of hard working American citizens. That can’t be me!!

Yup…I hear you. That’s exactly what I said. To be fair, let’s review the symptoms of greed and see how we all fair. Here’s an excert from an article in Christianity Today (Robert C. Roberts, April 8, 1996, pp 29-33):

A sure sign of greed (the disordered desire for wealth) is that your wanting things always outruns your having them. Greed is the successful businessperson who tells you, without blinking, that he is on the bring of poverty. It is the middle-class couple who says they cannot afford to have another child. It is “upward mobility,” the climb that ends not in satisfaction and peace, but in exhaustion, disappointment, and emptiness. “Sweet is the sleep of (poor) laborers whether they eat little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will not let them sleep,” says the Preacher (Eccles. 5:12). Greed in its advanced stages will not let us rest content.

 

Jesus connects greed with anxiety: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed . . . Do not worry about your life . . .” (Luke 12:13-34). Anxiety about our “security” drives us into a pattern of acquiring more and more, but the acquiring of more also leads to anxiety…

This article hit me hard. I have a good job, yet I complain about being broke and in poverty. I am a middle-class person who has said every now and then that I couldn’t possibly afford another child. If I had put lotion on every time I wrung my hands in anxiety, I would be baby-silk smooth.

To truly be successful and happy, we’ve got to kill this monster in our hearts.

Let me know what you think of this article! Is it right or way off?