"I Want to be a Doctor"

No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Matthew 6:24

I was chatting with a seven-year old friend earlier today when she leaned in towards me for a little tête-à-tête. I obliged, leaning close to hear what she might say, and she whispered into my ear, "When I grow up, I want to be a doctor." A smile lit my face. What a smart girl to be thinking about her future already.

"Why?" I asked her. "Why do you want to be a doctor?"

I wasn't exactly prepared for her response. She lifted her eyebrows with delight as she said very slowly, "I want to make money," rubbing her fingers together at that last word, like she was counting currency.

Oh horrors! Whatever happened to "I want to help people" and "I want to save the world"? What is this world coming to?!

But as aghast as I was at her statement, I had to admit that she was perhaps the most self-aware of us all. She had the wisdom at her age to voice what most of us only admit to ourselves after years of frustration. In truth making money and success in business are our very great, if not principal motivators for roughing it out through another day. Why is this so? I know it has to do with the sense of security that comes with having money. It's a truth of life: "Money answereth all things", so the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes 10. There are so many things we can achieve - for self, family, country and God - when we have money.

Having said that, like so many poets old and new insist, money cannot buy happiness. We know this just as surely as we know that night follows day. But it doesn't stop us from our almost pathological thirst for more and more money. I think most people are so driven by the desire for money because as humans we have a need to feel in control of our circumstances. Whether we admit it or not, trusting in something unseen and intangible is so much more difficult than trusting in what we can hold with our own two hands or, for that matter, in our wallet. Surrender is a very difficult thing for us to do.

But that is what God calls us to. When Jesus said, "Let the children come to me … for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these," (Mark 10) he alluded to their implicit trust. "I assure you", he said, "anyone who doesn't have their kind of faith will never get into the Kingdom of God." We must trust first in God before anything else. Matthew 6 says, "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well." Which would you rather do - Work for money or work for God and have money work for you? I know which I'll choose.

With love, Doosuur.