Money (or a lack of) and God’s greatness

*Trigger warning: mention of sexual assault and mental health 

It’s taken me months to figure out how to articulate my story. Truth be told, I am currently sat in the bathtub writing this because I’m scared that the words will evade me again.

I’ve built up this image of a life that I want you to see. So much so that it’s hard to reach out for help when needed. But like Alexander Hamilton (minus the infidelity), I’ve decided that I’ll write my way out of this situation. To cope, to heal, and to be free from the torment that is the lifestyle most assume that I live. 

April 2022

I started my first ever retail job. Awkward and rather ditsy, I couldn’t figure out why I got the job, but after months of applying to anything and everything to fund the final leg of my journalism masters degree, I was delighted. 

The first day was great, until it wasn’t. I had served a customer and made a big sale. Given my social anxiety, I took pride in my efforts. But as I went to hand the customer their items, the events took a dark turn. I was sexually harassed and stalked in that moment and on multiple occasions, marking the beginning of what would be a difficult three months of my life, dealing with entitled middle-class men for the sake of keeping a minimum-wage job in the face of increasing living costs.

June 2022

I was overjoyed to find that I had been offered work in my field and without thinking sent my resignation letter to the manager at my retail job for a July finish. I wasn’t bitter at my job (hence why I will not mention what store employed me or who my employer was) but afraid, tired, and in need of escape. However, I was not out of the tunnel just yet. 

Enticed by the offer, I can only describe what happened next to be like the cliff scene in the Coyote and Road Runner sketches from Looney Tunes. I realised that nothing was in writing and found that the offer was rescinded – the ground was torn from beneath my feet. I then began the descent towards debt. 

Growing up in a low income household and volunteering at a homeless shelter through the three years of my first degree, I was no stranger to money troubles. I knew what money (or a lack of) could do to a person. My sisters used to always say to me that “nobody is ugly, just poor.” I internalised that, and it shaped the way I looked at my bachelors degree in politics, often arguing in seminars that crime, suffering, and other forms of ugliness in the human experience went hand-in-hand with poverty. 

How could this have happened? I came to the city with £5,000 in savings and found myself drawing close to my first year with nothing, accompanied by the fear of losing my dignity alongside other things that money couldn’t buy. I was a poor woman, traumatised by rich men, let down by rich employers, and unsure whether to respond with flaming rage or a stream of tears. 

July 2022

I began to pray and apply to anything and everything. Whatever my two degrees could get me – whatever my experience as a 16-year-old waitress could afford me – I applied for. For weeks, nothing returned. Resigning in my heart, I turned to clinical trials, whilst propping up a blissful exterior of luxury and extravagance. I was drowning, but many assumed I was an avid swimmer.

Reflecting on the ratio of prayer to action, I saw action as the first and foremost and prayer as “all else to do”. But the realisation struck me that prayer in a situation out of my control can’t be reduced to all that can be done and was supposed to be the primary thing to do. In fact, prayer is action just like applying to jobs, except with the help of the One who created all things – employers and employment included.

I started to withdraw to meet with God, uttering desperate pleas.

“Lord, I don’t want to fall off the conveyor belt. I’m so close and I don’t want to fall off.”

Do you know what it feels like to be so close? About to fall into the abyss? There is only one thing more terrifying than falling in: looking over the edge and still seeing and knowing nothing, thinking, “when will there be a thud?”

What I was unaware of at this time was that God was answering prayers through my loved ones; a younger sister who I had helped throughout the small part of my adult life that I was too proud to ask from, and a partner who had in abundance but was swatted away by my insistence on keeping at arms length. I had seen in my younger years and lived out in that present time the things that men with money do to women without. Although his countenance was warm and bright, I’d vowed to myself that I wouldn’t trust it. 

What I couldn’t grasp was that my sister wanted to help me for the times I’d helped her. My partner’s offer of support were not means of control, but a foreshadowing of the infamous vow to remain faithful ‘for richer or poorer’.

I was loved. It was that simple.

August 2022

The Lord helped me get work. Not just at any place, although offers and interviews did come and go. I got to work in my dream job. 

Whilst I love my life and what I do, I want to focus on what I have learned in this period of my womanhood and how the spiritual trajectory of my life has been redirected.

Firstly, poor people are not ugly.

The most beautiful people I met were with me in the struggle. Estranged mothers. Broke designers. Overworked and underpaid staff. I interviewed them. I walked with them. I ate with them. And their strength in chaos was admirable. Emerging from this dark hour, I will not pass them by. Even if I have nothing to give, I will offer a smile because I hope to be half as beautiful as those in the midst of suffering.

Secondly, there is no such thing as the self-made woman.

I knew this, but now, I know this. Every time that I turned up to events, did something creative, and attempted to get my work noticed, I remembered my sister and partner, who did not turn their warm and bright faces from me in my troubles. 

But finally, in the battle between God and money, money can never be God.

The Bible tells us that you have to make a choice between serving God or money (Matthew 6:24) – choose God. I was actually re-watching my favourite Disney classic, The Princess and the Frog, last weekend when Dig a Little Deeper played. I sang along as I always had but the words, “money ain’t got no soul, money ain’t got no heart”, resonated with me so much more than they did when I was a young girl. Money can’t and won’t love you. Money won’t sympathise with your trembling voice in the dead of night that begs for relief from the pain. 

Choose God. 

-Pepper