Poverty or Riches?

"But godliness with contentment is great gain" (1 Timothy 6:6, NIV).

A friend recommended a movie to me the other day entitled "In Time" starring Justin Timberlake. Wow! Great movie because it makes you THINK.

Without spoiling the movie for someone who actually wants to rent and watch it, the movie is set in a world where time is currency. Everyone's "clock" starts ticking at age 25. The long and short of it: when your time runs out, you die.

So, you can imagine the stark differences between the haves and the have nots in a world where time is currency. The haves can live forever if they don't do something stupid and get themselves killed. But the poor — they live day to day. They don't have time to build for the future because they're just trying to make it to tomorrow.

On the one hand, you shake your head and think of how bad it is for the poor of this world. The movie is mocking the truth of our real world. It is very difficult to move "up" a rung or two on the socioeconomic ladder anymore. There's a reason it is said that the poor and disadvantaged are in a "poverty trap." The poor end up spending so much time and energy simply trying to survive that there's very little left to actually try to climb out of the "trap."

But then the movie shows you life in the other time zone. You observe the unhappiness among the privileged and realize, "they're trapped too!" Trapped in a mindset where they're frightened of losing "all that time" and being reduced to living like the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The movie makes us empathize with the plight of the overwhelming majority of the planet's impoverished humanity. 

However, yesterday another thought came to me. It is a line in the Lord's prayer: "give us THIS DAY our DAILY bread." In some ways the poor have it better. The Bible promises that the poor are taken care of by God Himself (blessed are they that hunger …. for they shall be filled). Often there is faith among the poor that is harder to find proportionately among the very wealthy. I

Is Karl Marx right that "religion is the opiate of the masses"? Or does the wealth of the privileged few give them a false sense of security so that they erroneously believe that they have no need of God?

In the movie most people had about a day on their clocks — a per diem (Latin for "per day"). As I think about it, having "just enough" may actually be preferable to having "too much."

One day at a time, Sweet Jesus

That's all I'm asking of You

Give me the strength to do everyday

What I have to do

Yesterday's gone, Sweet Jesus

And tomorrow may never be mine

So for my sake teach me to take

One day at a time

Postscript

"First, help me never to tell a lie. Second, give me neither poverty nor riches! Give me just enough to satisfy my needs. For if I grow rich, I may deny You and say, "Who is the LORD?" And if I am too poor, I may steal and thus insult God's holy name" (Proverbs 30:8-9, NLT).