What is Your Net Worth?

I bet you think I’m asking a financial question.  But I’m not, and that’s just the point.

It’s been just over a year since I received a paycheck.  For the previous 40 years, University of Detroit Mercy had validated my service to its students and colleagues with regular checks adequate to support a simple lifestyle.  As long as we were spending less than we received, I felt confident that we’d be fine, and we were.  We raised the kids, sent them through Catholic school, and got them started in college.  As we approached age 62, our earliest opportunity to begin drawing Social Security benefits, we both began to look at the benefits of retirement.  We’d learned that health is not to be taken for granted, and did not want to postpone it any longer than necessary.  We had made conservative investment decisions, and it seemed that we had adequate resources to take the plunge.  I told my boss that

it would be my last year, and the clock began ticking.  And I began to feel concern about financial security.

We found a house near our grandkids.  My replacement was found at the university.  For three or four months, while we moved out of our lodgings at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House and into our new home, I continued to receive paychecks because of accrued vacation and summer pay.  But in July a year ago, paychecks stopped and health insurance premiums began, and financial fear took hold of me.  After 40 years of diligence and thrift had provided a gradually growing nest egg, I began to see our net worth begin to decline.  I began to network and interview for jobs, but realized that working for half of my already modest UDM pay would not motivate me to work without distraction as the employers deserved, and I was reminded that young people with families needed the job more than I did.  I looked at ways of making money on woodworking, long a source of delight and occasionally of income.  My motivation was simple: fear.

Then I saw a headline that read, “What is your net worth?”  just after I had been reflecting on the Gospel story of Jesus calling his apostles – from their nets.  I found myself called away from my preoccupation with financial fear by putting the question not in the voice of the Wall Street Journal, but he sea-side Savior.  And now I am not looking at my spreadsheet, its rows and columns separated by thin lines on my computer screen, its spaces filled with numbers – amount saved, amount earned, monthly bills, amount left.  Now I am sitting on a log, feeling the coarse, wet hemp of my net as I pass each knot through my fingers, inspecting each one for wear, so that by saving a failing knot I can save the net.  The net smells of the sea, of the sand, but mostly of the fish that have been caught in it over the years, the years that have turned my skin rough and leathery.  This net and the boat are all I have.  And here is this stranger who does not smell of fish asking me what my net is worth?  It is worth everything to me.  It provides me and my family with life.

Two insights struck me there at my desk: first, the simplicity of the fisherman’s life, the reliance on daily catch, daily providence, daily bread; second, that Jesus was calling him to leave the net and follow him, to be fishers of men. I looked again at my spreadsheet, with its net worth trend lines that went up or down as I played with numbers that were only pixels on my screen.  They seemed so nebulous, so artificial.  They seemed a fabrication, a phantom.  The net was real.  It smelled of real fish.  I thought of the Gospel story of Jesus telling the disciples to toss their nets out, out into a sea that had yielded them nothing through a long night.  I thought of the abundance that came to them by doing as this Jesus had called them to do.

I thought of the net of my life.  I thought of the matrix of years, of faces that come to me in my memory, of things we have done, of good ideas and worthwhile projects and fruitful efforts.  I thought of the bounty that has come from daily tossings of this net into life.  And I found that it was the question “What is your net worth” voiced by Jesus that was more meaningful to me than the question posed by the article “What is your net worth.”  The Wall Street Journal article was about adequacy.  The Gospel story was about trust.  Trust feels better to me.  I feel more called by Jesus than by the Journal.  How about you?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.