Some Thoughts about Practicalities of Building Consecrating Economies

From time to time we think about the Law of Consecration and discuss the Saints in the early days of the Church and how they couldn’t live it, and we wonder how to live it today and what would be required to build Zion and the New Jerusalem.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the idealistic part of it and imagine how awesome it would be, isn’t it? 

The older I get and the more I think about it, the more I realize that idealizing it actually gets in the way of thinking it through and figuring out how to solve the problems involved. 

It seems like living a life of consecration and building Zion requires a very fine balance between a number of opposing principles. We have to know what they are and master them to get anywhere on this.   There has to be a balance between the individual and the communal, between the material and the spiritual. The idealistic doctrines and the hard economic realities must either mesh harmoniously or be held in a useful tension.  There’s also the matter of finding a way to make it work across different types of economies at different stages of development, in different areas of the world, with different cultures and law systems governing work and ownership and so on.  This is a complex challenge.

It seems to me that it is something that is learned line upon line, and consecration is a culmination of principles. I also think that the way consecration as an economy would be lived now in a modern economy is different than how the Saints tried to live it in the 1800s, simply because the type of economy we live in has changed. 

Consider just one factor—land. In an agricultural economy, consecrating a farm one owns is one thing, but when one’s livelihood comes from employment at a business one doesn’t own, what does consecration look like? A job can’t be consecrated because the employer would probably say it was never a permanent possession. Instead, one would have to consecrate one’s salary.

Maybe we should pull back a little on that and consider how the principle of consecration might mesh with that of self-reliance.

Self-reliance is about providing for one’s own needs and the needs of one’s family. To that end, we seek to obtain a good education and obtain work in a field that provides enough and hopefully a surplus. We pay our tithing, store food and build up an emergency fund for a rainy day. I think we are also expected to get out of debt. Also, budgeting helps with living within our means.

The storing of food and funds for a rainy day suggests that saving is permitted and even expected.  But then we also run into interesting questions. If one is to consecrate one’s surplus, where does one’s responsibility to provide for future expenses begin or end?  If a person always passes on their surplus to the Church, then how does one pay for large future expenses (car replacement, child’s education, medical expenses, house, retirement)?  Or should consecration of surplus happen after putting by savings for the future? 

I have no hard-and-fast answers. Maybe part of consecration is working these things out for ourselves.

Let’s think about the idea of surplus for a bit. Surplus is whatever is left over that isn’t needed. In order for us to know what is surplus, we have to get an idea of what we really need. The tool for this is the budget.

Budgets are beautiful things. Many people tend to think of them as a strait jacket, but what they are is a tool for analyzing spending, discovering your spending priorities, and dealing with financial challenges and future needs.  They help us uncover inefficiencies in our spending.  The power to reallocate funds from category to category helps us deal with emergencies, roll with the punches, control our money instead of letting it control us, and plan ahead. I really think using a budget is a skill that scales in all kinds of interesting directions. Used to the full, it can help us know whether we are materially self-reliant or not, moment to moment, rather than just at the end of the month when it’s time to balance the accounts.  All those little categories represent little bits of our material stewardship.

Let’s think about stewardship a little.  The principle of stewardship is that God is the owner and we are his stewards, so everything we have is part of that. Eventually we will have to give an account of our stewardship (material and spiritual), so we have an eternal interest in working hard, maximizing our efficiency, growing in capability, preserving what we have, and learning to make wise decisions.  Keeping and maintaining a budget is a fabulous tool for seeing how financial decisions have consequences over time.  It reveals inefficiencies. It reveals where our money priorities have been in the past, which is an invitation to evaluate and make changes if needed. 

Here’s another question I have. When it comes time to build the New Jerusalem, I wonder about how its economy will work. Obviously it will require faithful, consecrating people. The faithful people must provide for themselves, so I assume they will have jobs. In order for there to be jobs, there must be businesses and entrepreneurship.  Perhaps they will own the businesses.  But for there to be businesses, there must be demand, so there must be a solid customer base.  Where do these customers come from?

Perhaps the customer base doesn’t have to be in the New Jerusalem itself. Maybe it can be elsewhere.  But for Zion businesses to have a good customer base, the products must be superior enough and/or cheap enough among all the choices available that customers gravitate toward those businesses. (Oh look! Supply-side management! Manufacturing! Economies of scale!) Another factor that makes this tricky is that command economies tend to fall apart, so creating artificial demand or supply is not going to work.  And then there’s the can of worms of hiring faithful members without running afoul of anti-discrimination hiring laws.  Members will have to be work to be the best possible job candidate to be hired on.

Another question I have pertains to how interconnected economies are today. And yet there is a scripture that speaks of Zion becoming independent of all other creatures. Does that independence apply at the individual level, or at the level of economies? Is it possible to be interconnected and yet independent on an aggregate level?

I don’t pretend to know all the factors that have to be in place, but these are a few things that run through my mind.  What about you? 

Thoughts about Self-Reliance

I thought that the visiting teach message on self-reliance had a lot of things that I needed. (Incidently, I’m incredibly thrilled that the VT message has been moved to second in the magazine! Yaaaay! No more flipping frantically to try to find it!)

Self-reliance means using all of our blessings from Heavenly Father to care for ourselves and our families and to find solutions for our own problems. (Julie B. Beck)

Here’s the kicker to that simple statement: in order to use all your blessings, you have to be perfectly aware of them and be able (and willing) to leverage them. Another thing that occurs to me is that we have to get over any ideas of “I’ll just wait and the Lord will bring ______ into my life.” No, self-reliance is all about being anxiously engaged so that when the Lord brings opportunity into our lives, we will have met him halfway.

How do we become self-reliant? We become self-reliant through obtaining knowledge, education, and literacy; by managing money and resources wisely, being spiritually strong, preparing for emergencies and eventualities; and by having physical health and social and emotional well-being. (Julie B. Beck)

Notice the action words--obtaining, managing, preparing. Self-reliance has a lot to do with the principle of stewardship.

It took my husband and I six years of marriage before we learned how to build, use, and manage a budget. That was a big deal.

The last few months, my husband and I have moved our family budget to an Excel spreadsheet that I can have on my Palm Pilot. I enter in our purchases and I have set it so that it computes how much money is left in each category. This is much more convenient than having our budget on a memo when we had to compute what was left ourselves. However, I found that at the beginning of the month it was very time-consuming for me to create the next month’s budget. I didn’t know enough about Excel to know if there was any way to do it faster, so it was taking several hours. I really wished that I knew more.. but I wasn’t doing anything to find out.

Finally I realized that I needed to take responsibility and just go get a book on Excel at the library and see if I could figure some more things out. It really couldn’t be that hard. I’m a smart girl. (I’ve taken classes on at least six different programming languages, for heaven’s sake!) So I did. And I was right; there was something I could learn that cut down the time by at least 80%! And I was so excited that I set up budget sheets for the next four months to make the process even faster for myself.

Something else hit me as I was reading the message about self-reliance. I have some dreams of things I would like to do. I need to take responsibility if I’m ever going to achieve them. I love to organize and I want to help people become more organized and learn the skills they need, so I need to work on that rather than just waiting for something to happen. I have a story that I want to write, and I need to work on writing it, rather than just wishing I could write it.

The idea of preparing for emergencies and eventualities also struck me. We’ve been told by the prophets that we need to have food storage and some money saved. This is clearly meant to compensate for some of the biggest emergencies, such as losing a job or some other accident. It is impossible to plan for every emergency, but we can decrease the difficulty of the biggest ones and then all the littler ones should be covered as well. The idea of preparing for eventualities seemed singularly enlightening and showed me that yes, there are some things that we can predict will happen eventually and we can take steps to prepare for them. My husband and I are steadily building a car fund in anticipation of the day when we have to replace one of our cars. I’m starting to plan how we’re going to allocate money for this year’s vacation travel. There are any number of things that can be anticipated and planned for. Senior missions. Children going to college. Parents become too feeble to care for themselves. Funerals. How to fill time after retirement. Provision for children getting their driver’s licenses. Children going on missions. Looking ahead like this can help us gain greater vision. Planning can help us embrace the future rather than running away screaming at its mere mention.

Something else I thought about was emotional self-reliance. It takes emotional self-reliance to be able to have a good attitude even when things are hard. It’s okay to lean on others when we are weak, but we can’t lean on others permanently. It some point we have to stand on our own. Complaining prevents us from achieving this emotional self-reliance.

“Self-reliance is taking responsibility for our own spiritual and temporal welfare and for those whom Heavenly Father has entrusted to our care.” (Robert D. Hales)

Here’s some questions we can ask ourselves:

Am I waiting for my husband to suggest we have family home evening/scripture study/family prayer, or am I suggesting it myself?

Am I waiting for others to instruct me in doctrine before I learn, or am I searching the scriptures and the words of the prophets for myself?

Am I waiting for teachers to give good lessons, or am I studying the material myself?

Am I waiting for my priesthood leader to ask if I have committed a certain sin before I will confess it, or will I go to him and bring it up myself?

Am I waiting for my ancestors to appear to me before I do family history work, or will I start searching for them on my own?

Am I waiting for someone to give me extra food, or am I going to build food storage myself?

Am I waiting for the fire marshal to tell me that I need to clean up my house and get rid of stuff, or am I going to start working on getting organized myself?

Am I waiting for people to remind me of all my appointments, or will I write them on a calendar and check it each day myself?

Am I waiting to lose my job before I update my resume, or will I take care of it myself?

Am I waiting for people to tell me what jobs they want to give me, or am I looking at the options myself?

Am I waiting for others to teach my children good manners, or am I going to teach them myself?

Am I waiting for things to get so bad that my bishop and home teachers have to show me exactly how to make and use a budget, or am I going to do this myself?

Am I going to wait for someone to tell me to do my calling, or am I going to start working on it myself?

If there is a lot of things you realize you need to begin doing, try not to get stressed and overwhelmed. There is a time and a place for everything. Decide on something you will do and decide when you will do it. You can begin or increase your self-reliance in at least one thing today.