For the next few months, I will be spending my Saturday mornings with 20 or so people doing that thing we don’t do much of:  talking about money.

Darn, it is a loaded thing.  In the household I grew up in, it was somehow unseemly to talk about it.  Money (and that other big elephant, sex!) was not talked about.  It was my parent’s to deal with, and ours to know that it was high stakes stuff, based on the tension and shame that somehow seemed to surround it.

So I have made my way through much of life with a sort of distaste-love of money.  I love the power of making choices.  I don’t like the feeling of not-enough that inevitably rumbles when I lose my moorings and give myself over to what my culture wants me to know:  Namely, I will never have enough money, and never having enough money means that I will always be found wanting at some core level.

Yuck.  What this class I am taking at church consists of  is the teaching of a get-yourself-healthy-financially guru named Dave Ramsey.  It is brilliant.  Though he shares not many of my feminist sorts of sensibilities (at least, based on some of his har-har not so funny jokes) the man has a mission and he shares it effectively.  Financial Peace.  The two can go together.

I’m taking the class with my 23 year old daughter.  The class is being led by two men in their twenties.  There are folk from outside the church and inside the church learning ways to live a relationship with money that empowers rather than enslaves.

I followed that class with a training on adaptive leadership, and the presenter there talked about the power of words.  Rather than talking about what we don’t have, or about abundance – which means there will always be unattainables – he suggested the word “sufficiency”.

What do I need in my life?  What is sufficient for me and my house?

The questions are great.  The class is great.  The power of taking money out of the closet and into the places of my life that make for hope and healing is mighty fine.

We’ll be offering the class again in the fall.  I’m bearing witness here.  It’s great.