“Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives…Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”
– Robert D. Putnam
It was more difficult than I thought it would be to write this particular post in this series on wealth. So I decided to start with a simple question.
How do I define spirituality?
Okay, not so simple. It’s a word that means many different things to many different people.
For the purpose of this blog post I will define it this way: Spirituality encompasses our morals and ethics, our capacity to love others as we love ourselves, our sense of justice and mercy, the level to which we are able to discern good from bad, the generosity, gratitude and grace we give, and a willingness to let everything go.
As I have mentioned in past posts, wealth is not just about money or material possessions, but also about being content.
Spirituality is tied to contentment and shapes how we interact with material wealth. Material wealth and the allure of possessing more and more can negatively impact our spiritual health and contentment, but only if we become spiritually lazy.
Spiritual health is like physical health – it takes exercise and training to maintain. More money and more possessions vie for our focus and time. We start to worry about whether it is enough, where we can get more, how easy it might be to lose it all, where to store it all, and how to keep track of it all. Over time we become more self focused and wary of those around us. Are they trying to get at my stuff? We even start to call close friendships into question while we make poor choices in new ones.
Yuck.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Spiritual health leads to contentment, and contentment is the key to true wealth.
Contentment is the ability to let things go. Possessions as well as fears, ideologies, grudges, dreams and on and on. I have only just begun to experience being content, but with practice it allows us to go places and experience things that we never would have otherwise.
Being content leads to a growing desire to live simply (this does not mean poorly!) letting go of the need for more stuff simply because it is shiny and available and everyone else has one (according to the advertisers).
Living simply means living on less, and as a result leaving more to save. More to save means, you guessed it, more to build wealth and share.
Those most content in life have what they need, are satisfied with what they have in any circumstance, and enjoy sharing what they have with others. They are not burdened by any of their possessions. The few possessions they have are chosen because of the joy they bring.
Tend to your spirituality – it is like a garden, untended it grows wild with weeds and becomes ugly and overgrown, while properly tended it not only provides nourishment but beauty as well.
SingleLife (TM)
I am currently writing a book on living single and the unique blessings that come to us through living the single life and that come through us to others through the way we approach and live out the single life.
As a visually-oriented person who has always been fascinated by typography and text based logos, I was playing around with different thoughts, words, phrases and fonts related to this theme of singleness, and I eventually stumbled upon the image you see here. I am hoping that this, or some improved version, might become a badge of honor at some point for those of us who choose to boldly embrace the single life.
To describe in summary what I believe are the blessings of the single life, I have chosen to lay them out in the vein of one of my favorite movies, Fight Club, as the Rules of SingleLife:
Of course, there are no real rules to the single life, but I hope these serve as a guideline for starting to live a SingleLife with purpose and meaning. These “rules” will hopefully be improved upon over time and I intend to talk about each more specifically over time (and in much more detail in the book).
There is no curse in being single – your family is wherever and with whomever you create community. My hope is that your community not only includes other people but also a deep relationship with God that gives hope, freedom and a passion for justice.
Please leave feedback on any of this – whether you have additional “rules” to add, you love/hate the badge image, you think I’m just another crazy single person trying to compensate for [fill in the blank], etc. I love being single, and am constantly striving to live the SingleLife the way the apostle Paul advocated (I said “striving to” – I am nowhere near there yet) in his letter to the Corinthians:
I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.
To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.
(1 Corinthians 7:7-8)
Join me on this journey of living the SingleLife with purpose!
