The Golden Rule (Prayer Devotional for the week of March 20)

/ faithsweatandtears / Leave a comment

If we randomly picked a child from the worship service this morning and asked her/him about the Golden Rule, s/he could probably recite it by heart. Variations of the Golden Rule exist in most major religions; even the unchurched know it:

 

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

 

Come to think of it, did you know that many of our everyday sayings came from the Bible? Here are a few:

  • “The writing on the wall” (If you’ve never read this amazing story in Daniel 5, it’s awe-inspiring.)
  • “The apple of my eye” (from Proverbs 7:2 and elsewhere)
  • “Out of the mouths of babes” (This one is often taken out of context, but it comes from Psalm 8:2.)
  • “Pride goes before a fall” (Proverbs 16:19, among many other references to pride)
  • “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10 – Notice that it says the love of money, not money alone.)
  • “Eat, drink, and be merry” (It’s a sarcastic remark about the futility of life, but it does come from Ecclesiastes 8:15.)

 

Like these and many other biblical proverbs, the Golden Rule has gone mainstream. If it’s such a commonplace saying, then why is it so difficult to put into practice?

 

It seems easy enough, but just because it is familiar does not mean that we’ve learned all we can know about it. Let’s spend our prayer time this week focusing on bringing the Golden Rule from our heads down into our hearts.

 

Summer garden goodies

/ faithsweatandtears / 1 Comment

We finished planting the summer garden today! Lord willing and barring the thieving squirrels that we encountered last year, we are looking forward to harvesting our own eggplant (hands-down my fave veggie!), green bell peppers, asparagus, zucchini squash, blackberries, Fall Gold raspberries and tomatoes.

 

The best thing about planting a garden together (besides the produce savings on the grocery store bill and the valid excuse to play in the dirt) is that the boys are more apt to try “their” crops. We have a general rule that you have to at least try everything on your plate, and there is no “yuck” served for dinner.

 

We also have a mystery plant from last year that we assumed had died but now appears to have revived and is sprouting, but no one can remember what it is! LOL – I think it might be peppers, but we’ll just be surprised. I also planted watermelon seeds late in the season last year, so there’s a slim chance that they will still sprout, but we won’t hold our breath.

 

In addition to the edible goodies, the boys and I also spruced up our flowerpots on the front porch with begonias and impatiens in hanging baskets and groupings of marigolds and petunias together in narrow pots on the ledge. It’s so pretty, I may start drinking my morning coffee on the front porch!

Call me heartless

/ faithsweatandtears / 1 Comment

One of my assigned papers this term concerns the federal deficit (i.e., how to reduce it). Among myriad topics that confuse me, I am trying to wrap my head around why the federal government sends humanitarian aid to countries to whom we are already indebted.

 

For example, the U.S. provided $4.9 million in humanitarian and defense aid to China after the earthquake in 2008. Yet, China holds $1,154,700,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities (i.e., our debt), as of January 2011. Instead of sending cash aid, why didn’t we just buy back $5 million (I rounded up) worth of Treasury notes?

 

Not to make light of the recent earthquake & tsunami in Japan, but the same scenario holds true there. In a report issued yesterday by USAID, the U.S. already has $8 million earmarked for relief aid. That just accounts for humanitarian aid; it doesn’t include the Department of Defense, which already had boots on the ground in Japan and at sea. Japan ranks second only to China as a major foreign holder of treasury securities, with a whopping $885,900,000,000 of U.S. debt in its wallet.

 

If I borrowed $10 from a friend to, say, purchase a CD, then she would [rightly] expect me to pay her back. What if, three days later, a family member of hers died unexpectedly, so I bought $15 worth of groceries to make a condolence meal for her family? That would be very sweet of me, but I still owe her the $10 that I borrowed.

 

Perhaps it sounds heartless to translate that onto an international scale, but given our deplorable national debt situation, we need to forego the “meal” gift and square away the ten bucks, first.

State education budget cuts

/ faithsweatandtears / Leave a comment

I heard a very informative presentation this morning by Jason Sabo on the likely impact of state budget cuts on our local community and the nonprofit sector, at large. (On a side note, I think I would love his job — he takes a complex, fear-ridden topic like the state budget and breaks it down into easily understandable chunks.) After his talk, I had several ideas and questions floating around my head, so I did some cursory research and crunched a few numbers.

 

I remembered that the Texas Lottery is supposed to support education, but I wasn’t sure how or to what extent. I discovered that in 2010, the Texas Lottery Commission contributed approximately $1 billion to the Foundation School Fund, which just so happens to be one of the big-ticket items that Mr. Sabo mentioned is on the state’s chopping block. That $1 billion represents 27% of lottery revenues, after 62% went to prizes paid and some smaller percentages to retail commissions and administration. (I was pleasantly surprised to see that administration (read: overhead) was only 5%. I don’t see any way to increase the percentage devoted to education except to decrease the percentage of prizes paid (by making the lottery even more statistically unattainable), which would be counter-productive because of the public backlash that would ensue.

 

I also discovered that the Foundation School Program has an endowed fund called the Permanent School Fund. As a development professional, this piqued my interest, so I investigated further. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) reported that the fund grew to $25 billion (market value) in 2010. That’s $25,000,000,000 in nice, round numbers.

 

What struck me as particularly interesting was the amount that the fund is releasing. Bear with me in the weeds here for a bit …

 

Most endowed funds with which I am familiar (private foundation funds, endowed university funds, etc.) typically allocate approximately 5% annually. The percentage is often based on a rolling calculation over a few years’ period of time to compensate for spikes and dips in the market, but 5% is a good benchmark for comparison purposes. For example, if you establish an endowed scholarship with a gift of $100,000, you can reasonably expect that your gift will generate somewhere in the ballpark of $5,000/year. The beauty of an endowed fund, of course, is that it lasts into perpetuity–only the earnings are spent, not the principal (“corpus”).

 

So, back to the Permanent School Fund. The fund plans to release $1.9 billion during the 2012-2013 biennium, which is a two-year period. According to my calculations, that represents only 3.8% of the fund value. A 5% disbursement would be closer to $1.25 billion each year, or, say, $2.5 billion in the biennium. That’s a difference of $600 million.

 

In the grand scheme of a $16 BILLION state budget shortfall still remaining (after the Rainy Day Fund is tapped, payments deferred to the next fiscal year, etc.), $600 million may not seem like much, but it’s a step. If we can find ways to cull a few hundred million from elsewhere in the budget, then it does add up.

 

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Mr. Sabo’s presentation: “Good politics always trumps good policy.” I’ve got to find a way to work that into one of my fiscal administration papers. 😉