(continued)	by Clare La Plante

Getting free
Find one spiritual practice that puts you on the road to recovery — prayer, meditation, walking, writing, singing. Make it something free, make it something beautiful, make it something your own. Pay off that debt, one penny by one penny, and watch yourself bloom. Save your credit cards for emergencies, when they can be useful, and throw off your burden.

	Get financial advice from Consumer Credit Counseling. Reduce debt in "7 Baby Steps" from www.daveramsey.com. Use this calculator to determine how long it will take to pay off your credit card debt. Check out this book: Money Mania: Mastering the Allure of Excess, by Mark L. Vincent, Herald Press, 2005.

Pay yourself first. Through prayer and meditation and friends, and cool glasses of water when it’s hot, and walks when it’s cool, and rest when you’re sleepy, and fresh eyes when you're weary. Pray more. Consider each day a gift that you cannot pay enough interest on. Don’t be afraid. Be like the lilies of the field.

Pay cash. Buy only what you can afford at that moment. Perhaps each purchase can be a silent prayer of intention and gratitude, a promise to self and to vendor that this is a relationship that furthers our own growth. In fact, use the whole process as a metaphor — we should only ever use what we have available at the moment, whether it’s time, energy, or money.

Ultimately, debt doesn’t serve us, and it makes us forget how free we really are. The other day my husband and I took our infant son to several worrisome doctor visits. We had time to spare between appointments and went to a small diner on a nondescript road between car shops and chain sandwich stores. Inside this small restaurant, a Greek woman and a 10-year-old girl were serving two men at the counter.

The woman — the owner — didn’t accept anything but cash, she told us as we went to sit down. She’d had bad experiences with checks, she said, and credit cards were too much trouble. My husband and I had about ten bucks between us, but decided to stay.

The owner came over to take our order and looked at my son. “He is OK, he is strong,” she said, apropos of nothing. The food was good. We didn’t have everything we wanted, but we had everything we needed.

Clare La Plante is co-author of two books on the saints: Heaven Help Us: The Worrier's Guide to the Patron Saints and Dear Saint Anne, Send Me a Man: And Other Time-tested Prayers for Love. She lives near Chicago with her husband and son.

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However, it is not the marketplace that created us, but God. God did not make us to be primarily ‘consumers’. We are made in God’s image — not a mirror image certainly — but there is something inherent in every human being that is also inherent in the character of God. Some theologians say we are like God because we have the ability to create. We are not ultimately consumers but co-creators with God.

Embedded in each human heart is the desire to create — a deep need and longing to grow, produce, cultivate, build. When we understand we were made, hard-wired you could say, by God to be passionate co-creators, our addiction to consuming is transformed into a passion for creating — for living within our means and with deep meaning. Our true identity is not found in what the marketplace says we must have — but in who God created us to be.

Reflecting on Jesus’ life story in the gospels you can catch a vision for what it means to be a co-creator with God. Jesus understood that God made him (and every human being) to create. Jesus spent his time creating, growing, producing, building. Where there was brokenness Jesus created wholeness; where there was condemnation Jesus produced forgiveness; where there was loneliness Jesus built community; where there was hunger, Jesus provided nourishment; where there was hopelessness, Jesus created hope.

Some Christian theologies emphasize Jesus’ life as only a model for an individual plan to "get into heaven"; but Lutheran theology sees Jesus’ life differently. For Lutherans Jesus’ life is primarily a model for living fully the creative life God intends for us here on earth, now. A creative life that is good for you, for others, and for the world. It is for a full and creative life now that Jesus sets us free! If you are in debt that doesn’t mean you are free from the obligation and responsibility to repay. It does mean that in the midst of doing the hard work of meeting your responsibilities you learn to live your life as God created you to live — a passionate co-creator with God.

Pastor Sheri Delvin serves at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in Evanston, Illinois.

Go to Tip Jar and read the seven ways to live as a co-creator with God.