We Cannot Afford The Kind Of Trip Everybody Takes

It is August, or it is Christmas, and your phone is full of other people's photographs.

And you are not envious exactly. You are pleased for most of them, genuinely. What is happening is something quieter and worse: you are looking at your own children and doing arithmetic about what they are not getting, and the arithmetic never comes out in your favor because it is not designed to.

Let me start with the fact rather than a feeling, because you deserve the fact.

You cannot afford it. That is true. It is not a mindset, it is not a failure of planning, and it is not something that dissolves if you look at it correctly. Some families have money you do not have, and this year you cannot do what they are doing.

I am not going to tell you it will come. It might not. I am not going to hint that if you gave more, or believed more, or held on, then next August would look different, because that is a lie told in churches and it does real damage to people who then blame themselves for a bank balance.

What I want to look at is the comparison, because the money is real and fixed, and the comparison is neither.

I have learned, in whatsoever state I am

There is a line Paul writes from prison about money, and the key word in it is easy to walk past.

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. (Philippians 4:11, King James Version)

I have learned.

Not I am naturally. Not it comes easily to me. Learned, which means there was a time when he had not, and there was a process, and the process was not pleasant, and he is describing an outcome rather than a temperament.

That should be a relief to you, because you have probably been treating contentment as a thing you either possess or lack, and taking your August feelings as evidence that you lack it.

And notice what he is careful to say first. Not that I speak in respect of want. He is not pretending the want is not there. He knows exactly what he does not have and he says so plainly, and then he says he has learned something about how to stand in it.

So this is not a man saying it does not matter. It is a man saying he found out how to be a person while it was true.

You are able to learn this rather than being required to already have it, and heaven has never once treated the wanting as a failure. Philippians 4:11 names the want plainly before it names the contentment and calls the contentment learned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a process a person can be in the middle of.

What the comparison is made of

Here is the thing about what you are comparing against, and I think you already half know it.

You are comparing your ordinary life to other people's photographs. Not their holidays. Their photographs, which are four selected images out of nine days, and which do not contain the argument in the airport, the child who was ill for two of them, the cost that is still being paid off, or the two hours where nobody spoke.

That is not a criticism of them. Everybody posts the good four. But you are measuring the whole texture of your year, including all its Tuesdays, against a curated strip of somebody else's best hours, and no life survives that comparison. Theirs would not either.

And there is a second thing underneath it, which is the one that actually hurts: you are afraid your children are missing something, and that they will know it, and that they will one day describe their childhood as the one where they never went anywhere.

I cannot promise you what they will say. But children do not remember expenditure. They remember whether they were with you and whether you were happy while you were there, and I have never once heard an adult give an account of their childhood in terms of what it cost.

You are measuring a whole life against four photographs, and it has never once been an honest comparison. The written word states the want and then reports something learned inside it, and the Spirit of God is the one who breaks a comparison that no family could survive.

One outing under the price of a takeaway

So here is the assignment, and the size of it is deliberate.

Plan one outing that costs less than a takeaway.

Not a cheaper version of a holiday. A day, or half a day, that costs almost nothing: a bus somewhere, a walk to a place none of you have been, a picnic on a bit of grass twenty minutes away, a whole afternoon somewhere free with sandwiches made at home.

And do not present it as making the best of things. Children read a tone instantly, and if the day arrives labeled as what we can afford, they will receive it as a lesser thing and remember it that way. It is not a lesser thing. It is a day out with the people they love, which is what all of the expensive ones are as well.

Then go, and stay long enough for it to be a day rather than an errand. Two hours minimum. The staying is what makes it count.

Philippians 4:11 puts the learning inside the actual circumstances rather than after they improve, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a bit of grass with a family and some sandwiches.

You are able to go somewhere on almost nothing, and it has never once been a consolation prize. Philippians 4:11 reports contentment learned in the middle of real want, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a family on a cheap day that turns out to be a real one.