It’s great to have a lot of money. I know this to be true because once a month I feel as if I have a lot of money and I like it. It makes me wonder whether I might buy a new bike, or some new sneakers, whether I might go out for dinner or book a weekend away somewhere glamorous and romantic. It’s a great feeling.
And it lasts about a nanosecond, or as long as it takes to realise that the number on my payslip, minus the mortgage, the bills, the council tax, a little food, toothpaste and a pint is approximately equal to zero, so the new bike goes on hold until, oh, roughly speaking, never.
The thing is, I’d be very happy if I could resign myself to that monthly inevitability but the sorry truth is I can’t. I wish I had more money. I fantasise about what I’d do with a million pounds. Or ten million. And before I know it I’m looking resentfully at blokes with better bikes and new sneakers and getting a little bit Gollum about the whole thing.
Now the bible has plenty to say about money and what I wish it said was that money is a bad thing, because then I could at least assume some moral superiority over those that have it.
But it doesn’t. What it actually teaches is an attitude, that it’s not money itself that’s dangerous, it’s the love of money, because when we love money we cannot love anything else, or, more importantly, anyone.
I find that immensely challenging because my attitude, sadly, tends towards, if not actually loving money, then at least looking at it rather fondly and wistfully from a distance. And that doesn’t tend towards contentment.
It’s a vast encouragement, then, to hear people during this Children in Need week, literally competing to give money away or pouring all their creativity into finding new ways to get it, not for themselves but for people they’ve never met and never will. I reckon it’s the opposite of the love of money – it’s the love of people. Not people like us, or people who love us, just people.
And if the love of money is the root of all evil, the love of people, surely, is the root of all hope.