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faith & finance

faith & finance

Di: Nicholas Garofalo
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A proposito di questo titolo
 The Faith & Finance newsletter, read aloud — weekly reflections on money, stewardship, and the Christian life.

faithandfinance.substack.comNicholas Garofalo Catechesi ed evangelismo Cristianesimo Economia Finanza personale Spiritualità
Episodi
  • “...if the Lord is with you, you can fly.”

    “...if the Lord is with you, you can fly.”
    Oct 26 2026
    In the beginning, a new business startup is, essentially, a survival game. Keep it alive, keep cash flowing, keep customers coming, see what happens. But after a while, the hope is that we move from crawling to walking, walking to running, and, hopefully, running to flying. But it doesn’t always go that way. And even when it does, sometimes that growth curve is wretchedly long; brutally flat, sometimes for years.If your friend started a business and, five years in, he still could not afford to pay his wife, would you call him a failure? Would you tell him to quit and get “real job”? Perhaps, if you’re kind, you’d at least chalk this up to a hobby — maybe a charity? 😂 — but not a job. Not a business.That’s where our story begins.And I’m already giving it away because, if it’s a story worth telling, then you’re now waiting with baited breath to hear the glory story.But pause with me for a second… because crawling for five years - 260 weeks - is a brutal, grueling, soul-crushing experience.This guy had borrowed $600 to start making miniature picture frames in his garage. His two young sons glued the frames together for seven cents apiece and his wife handled the shipping.She did so, quite dutifully, for five long years—without pay. That’s not something I’d typically recommend. And quite honestly, that’s part of why I’m telling the story.They were super tight on money, obviously, so every dollar they could spare went back into the business. Only many years later, did he describe those early days as crawling: “You crawl and crawl. Eventually you get on your feet. Then, if the Lord is with you, you can fly.”I gotta confess … the flying sounds great. Most of us like the flying part. We all wanna fly. And who can blame us? We live in a world with “success stories” like Anthropic starting literally 5 years ago (Jan 2021) and today, 5.75 years later it’s value is estimated not in the billions but in the trillions of dollars.The crawling is so much more common. It’s real. And it’s very hard to romanticize when you are the one on your hands and knees.But they crawled. And, notably, they kept crawling.The little frame business became a small store. The small store became several stores. Several stores became a national company worth — you guessed it — billions of dollars.At that point, the problem changed. Early on, the question was how to keep the business alive. Now the question was what to do with everything it had become.Smart people called “advisors” came in to help the founder protect the wealth and pass the company to his children, then to his grandchildren.That’s pretty sensible advice. Time-tested. Understandable. “That’s what everyone would suggest” kinda stuff.Yet it made him miserable.He actually wept under the weight of it. Something was wrong. He could not live with the idea that generations of his family would inherit wealth they had not earned, especially when that wealth might hurt their character more than help it.One day while enjoying a prayer walk through his back yard, God brought a question to him: “What would you do with the company if another family owned it?”It landed so squarely that he points to that mid-day walk as a pivotal moment in his life.The answers came very quickly. If another family owned the company, he would manage it faithfully. He would work hard. He would take care of the people in it. But he would not confuse the company’s money with his own.Bingo.The company did not, in fact, belong to his family. It belonged, as all things do, to God.Christians say “God owns it all” so often that the words can lose their power. They’re true. We acknowledge them. We nod our heads. Sometimes we write checks. But our core beliefs usually lie out of reach. Beliefs like,“it’s really all up to me.”“I’m the provider for my family.”“I know God led me to start this business so I’m sure it will succeed.”That last one can really sound like faith. But God leading me to start a business doesn’t mean He has promised it will thrive. When I confuse the two, every slow month becomes a test of His trustworthiness. Now I’m trying to keep the business alive and prove that I was right about God. The role of a steward answers both because, as a steward, I’m responsible for working faithfully and leaving the outcomes up to God.If another family owned your business, you would not casually use its money to build your personal kingdom. If another family owned your investment account, you would not treat every gain as permission to raise your lifestyle. If another family owned your house, your time, and your abilities, you would probably ask more often what the owners wanted done with them.Ownership says, “Because this is mine, what do I want to do with it?”Stewardship asks, “Since all I have is the Lord’s, what would the Owner do with it?”That is the dichotomy of ownership and stewardship.The ...
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    12 min
  • The Gift That Leads to Death

    The Gift That Leads to Death
    Oct 19 2026
    “The Gift That Leads to Death.” I know, such a cheery start to your day. Probably not the day-one giving campaign sermon title of choice, and that’s fine.I want to put two stories from Scripture next to each other, starting with the widow in Zarephath in 1 Kings 17. Elijah comes to her and asks for bread, and she tells him she has a handful of flour and a little oil left. She’s going to make something for herself and her son, and then they’re going to die.That’s how little she has. She’s already thinking in terms of their last meal.So when she makes something for Elijah, I wonder how much hopelessness was wrapped up in that moment. Humanly speaking, you could almost read it as, “Well, what does it matter? Fine, you can have it.” We aren’t told everything going through her mind, but Elijah has also brought her a promise from God: the flour and oil will last until He sends rain.And she acts on it. This woman, who isn’t even part of Israel, trusts the God of this prophet enough to give from the bottom of her barrel. Somehow the flour doesn’t run out, and neither does the oil. There is food for her household through the famine.Then we get to Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5.It’s the early church, and people are bringing gifts to the apostles to care for the other believers. Ananias and Sapphira sell a piece of property and bring part of the proceeds, but they present the gift as though they’re giving the whole amount.And Peter sees straight through it.By the way, they were allowed to keep some of the money. Peter specifically says the property belonged to them, and after they sold it, the money was theirs to do with as they wished. They could have brought a portion and been honest about it.Instead, they lied. They wanted people to think they had surrendered everything while they were secretly holding something back. They wanted to be seen as these wonderfully generous people giving their lives to the service of the church.And both of them died.That is a sobering story to read, especially next to the widow’s. Both gave, and yet apparently not every gift is generous.Where is the giving coming from?The widow is responding to God’s word with almost nothing left. Ananias and Sapphira have property to sell, and they’re trying to manage what people think of them. From the outside, you could look at either gift and see someone being generous. But what’s happening in their hearts is very different.And I think it’s pretty easy for us to put spiritual language around mixed motives.I can give because I want to be faithful, but I can also give because I want to be impressive. Money might be losing its grip on me while approval still has a pretty firm hold. The outward act could look almost identical, even to me if I’m not paying attention.So “Am I giving?” doesn’t get far enough. Where is that giving coming from, and what is it doing in my soul? Who am I becoming as I give?I’ve talked before about the gravitational pull of wealth. We have to respect its ability to draw our lives into orbit around it. Giving can help loosen that grip, but I can also give an amount I’m perfectly comfortable with, get the satisfaction of feeling generous, and never have to trust God with anything that feels costly.Or I can give a lot and become even more attached to being known as someone who gives a lot.That possibility ought to make us pause before assuming the gift tells us everything we need to know.I can hide behind a good strategyIn my line of work, I talk about generosity in terms of tools quite often. Donor-advised funds, appreciated securities, estate planning, deductions. All of that matters, and it can be really helpful.Take a donor-advised fund. You can contribute eligible appreciated assets to a charitable account, then recommend grants to ministries and other charities from that account. Depending on the asset and your circumstances, that can allow more to go toward giving than selling the asset yourself, paying capital gains tax, and giving what’s left.That’s a really cool tool. I love helping people think through things like that.But you could set up the fund, contribute loads of appreciated stock, and still have the same heart problem you had before you started. A clever strategy can’t settle the question of why you’re giving.And sometimes the planning itself gives us a way to delay obedience.I have five kids, and then I have a sixth kid called Charity in my estate plan. The ministries we care about, our church, people getting the gospel to unreached places, will receive an equal portion of our estate.I’m glad we have that in place. But I also have to ask whether knowing they’ll receive something someday could become an excuse to ignore God’s prompting to give now.Because when I say, “I’m going to give a lot to them someday,” I should probably be more precise. My executor will give it. I’ll be gone.Oh, dang.There’s a different kind of trust involved ...
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    14 min
  • Then what?

    Then what?
    Oct 5 2026
    It’s a Monday. I’m driving into my office and listening to a voice memo from my good buddy out in Colorado. We banter about faith & finance topics all the time — in fact a few of my newsletter ideas have come from chats with him. And this one’s no different.He proposed to me the question on the other side of most every financial goal. And let me pause there — financial goals like…Build a businessGet rid of the mortgagePay for your kids’ collegeSave $1 million in your retirement accountsGet the promotion to secure your income for the foreseeable future.So you get the point. But I wanna share this question with you. On the other side of those goals … now what?The economic warning light that used to flash in the corner of your life has finally turned off.So what’s next?It’s a fair question because more money really can make life better, especially when there isn’t enough of it. Money can put groceries in the refrigerator, fix the transmission, cover the electric bill, and give a family room to breathe. The longing to provide well isn’t greed. For many people, earning more would relieve real pressure.But my friend’s question assumed that pressure had already lifted. The income is there, the family is healthy, the house is comfortable and the boxes are checked.What do you pursue when you no longer need to pursue the things that got you here?The little Eden we buildI think many of us spend years trying to architect our own little Eden.We want a beautiful life with everything we need, arranged carefully enough that very little faith is required. We don’t mind God being present, of course. We would simply prefer that he not disrupt the plans.So we work, save, insure, diversify, and optimize until we’ve protected ourselves from every problem we can imagine. Then, once the structure is secure, we plan to give God the overflow.One problem here is that we never defined how much was enough, so the overflow never quite arrives.There is always another expense, another upgrade, another milestone, or another risk to guard against. The imaginary line moves every time we get close to it. We keep assuming that one day we will look around, discover we have far more than we need, and become radically generous without having practiced generosity along the way.Proverbs says, “The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it a wall too high to scale.”Read that last phrase again: “…they imagine…“Money can protect us from many things. It can absorb a bad month, replace a roof, and pay for excellent medical care. But the wall is never as high as we imagine it is. Eventually, life reminds us that we are finite.The finish line keeps movingEven if life goes wonderfully, there is no natural point at which desire declares itself satisfied.I once heard a kind Englishman named Richard share his life story. He described what happened when his career changed and his income took off. He began earning in a month what he once earned in a year. Then he earned it in a few weeks. His lifestyle rose just as quickly.Wool became cashmere. Nylon became leather. The house got larger, and the schools became more exclusive. None of the upgrades stood out as outrageous on their own, after all … he could afford it. Couldn’t he?Then he realized that his consumption had become insatiable.Around that time, his church began raising money for a new building. As he studied the plans, he started researching what the same money could accomplish through ministries serving people in much poorer parts of the world. He had spent years asking what more money could add to his life. He began asking what it could accomplish through his life.That question changed the way he gave.For years, he increased his generosity beyond what felt comfortable. Each time, he feared he had finally gone too far and would discover that God would not provide. Each year gave him another chance to learn that God’s provision was sturdier than his fear.Then he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.Near the end of his life, he said he was grateful God had gotten hold of his heart before the fear of death forced the issue. His generosity had been freely offered, not extracted by a diagnosis.I heard his story 2 years after he died, and shared it with my friend on an ordinary Monday morning voice memo.Richard had no way to know where his obedience would travel or whom it would reach.A larger storyThe question “then what?“ assumes there is a finish line where the important work is complete and the rest of life has to be filled.But you may already have much of what you once thought would make you feel secure. You may have savings, a home, healthy children, meaningful work, and enough margin to absorb a surprise. In a real sense, you may have already arrived at someone else’s dream.And yet the worries remain. The goals multiply. The finish line moves.Life may still feel quite hard.Money cannot give us the kind of security that lets us...
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    15 min
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