Stewardship and TVs

      This is a story I shared with a good (atheist) friend of mine and it's an interesting story, so I decided to post it here. Weekend before last, Emily and I were at Walmart and they had a DVD player for $30, so we got it. Her old television has been sitting unused at my house for a while and we were kind of tired of watching movies on her laptop or my desktop (neither of us have or want cable). When we got home we discovered that the DVD player won't plug into her old TV since it only has a cable connector. Then we thought that maybe we could use her old VCR, which has cable connectors and others. It won't play videos, but if it let us run the dvd through it, the old thing might be worth keeping. So in the middle of the week, she brought it up for me to try fit into the system. It did have the right connectors, but apparently won't transfer between them (cable in goes to cable out, rca in goes to rca out).

      We looked into getting a box that would convert the signal, but it wasn't cheap and would lower the quality of the video, so we started looking into TVs. We also contemplated just taking the dvd player back and continuing to watch movies on the laptop, but wanted to see if we could find a better TV.

      Now at church we've been talking about stewardship and something that the pastor said stuck with me. His reasoning was something like this: If God created everything, including the resources from which we get money and possessions, then it's all ultimately His. So when we encounter unexpected expenses (for which God is also ultimately responsible) then we should let God spend his money or resources how he apparently wants to spend them rather than grumble about "wasting our money" as if it we really had control over things.

      With that in mind, I prayed about it and Emily looked on Craig's List and sent me a couple of ads. There was only one that was listed anywhere nearby and it was in my town, so I gave the guy a call. It turns out he lives in the apartment complex right behind me. In fact, when I walked into the apartment, I could see my bedroom window out their back door and it would have been about the same distance to carry the TV out their back door and to my house as it would be to carry it to my car. We did carry it to my car since there is a small embankment and a sizeable brush pile out the back, not to mention a deck railing to climb over. In any event, I figured that if God made it that easy to get a TV, that must be how he wants to spend his money (and I'm certainly not going to object to His buying me a television).