Hello Friend,

Lindsay and I were driving back from a medical appointment the other day when Pink Floyd’s “Money” passed through our playlist. We typically skip this song and other Pink Floyd songs as they tend to evoke a part of my past that I rarely relate to these days.

But as the base guitar laid down the catchy beat and the cash register chimed the unique intro, I looked over at Lindsay and we both agreed with a smile and nod to let the song play this time.

Our appointment was in Rapid City, approximately one hour north of where we live beneath the Ponderosa Pines in Custer State Park. There are two or three different routes between the two. We usually take the fastest route north because we don’t enjoy our visits to Rapid City much and like to get whatever errands require us to leave our home in the woods.

But for the past three years, we have always taken the same route south, which takes us off the 70 mph highway, cuts through an old ghost town and then leads into the heart of the Black Hills through the famous Needles Highway.

Regardless of the weather, we always roll the windows down and drive the twisty, turny roads as though they are an extension of our bodies hovering two feet off the ground as we glide in our metal and glass encasement at 35-40 miles per hour through the countryside.

There are a few properties we always love seeing on this drive. They start by the road and stretch back into the hills, a lush green passageway toward a large chunk of rock or two that defines the region. Along this stretch of road, we allow ourselves to dream of “one days” and “some days” when we’d love to afford just a portion of one of these valleys.

It has made me say more than once that I want to own a mountain one day. Maybe not a full mountain. But a swath of countryside ripe with hay and some large boulder would be the bulwark of a tiny home we may build with our own hands someday.

As the song played, we reflected separately on what this drive means and how much we have changed over the years. When we speak, it is out of an overfill of awe at this view or that, like when you turn right and come over a hill with just enough visibility to see the backside of Mount Rushmore or the nearby Cathedral Spires.

We don’t have enough money to buy property anywhere right now. This isn’t a political statement about the state of the economy. It’s just the simplest fact that seems to define us repeatedly since we have taken to the road.

I have looked back on my conversations, videos, newsletters, and posts over the years and realized that the topic of money, or lack thereof, has probably come up more often than anything else as I have tried to explain our lifestyle and the calling we have to wander.

Jesus said more about money than anything else, too. But He said it from the opposite perspective, challenging us to think more about Love than money or anything else for that matter.

Yet money makes the world go round. It can’t buy you love, but it can you a boat… and a truck to pull it…

(Yes, I threw three separate social references in one sentence, even combining the Beatles and a one-hit-wonder country song!)

I have recently decided that I want more than anything in life to be the kind of human being that Jesus was when He walked the earth. Whether you believe He was who He said He was and the profound and infinite impact this has on life and death is up to you.

But from every word He spoke or historical words written about Him, we could all say that Jesus was about the most remarkable human being that ever walked the face of the earth. Some Jewish tradition holds Jesus in high esteem for His knowledge and wisdom (though refuting His claim to be God). Muslim tradition holds Jesus to be a great prophet (but not their greatest prophet, let alone God).

What thought, ideology or theology could thread itself through three of the most influential religions in the world aside from this - that Jesus said and did some pretty remarkable things for humanity? These religions don’t agree on much. But they accept that Jesus was (is) a remarkable human being.

As I have shared in previous dispatches, Lindsay and I can’t relate our lives and experiences to you without doing so through the lens of our Christian faith. You don’t have to see things the way we do, but we just can’t explain life without looking through this lens.

So the way I see it, if Jesus spoke against money, or the love of money, more than any other topic, I should listen and learn.

If you read the past two updates, you know that Lindsay and I survived all sorts of personal and practical trials in our return to Custer State Park. Between hail storms and job insecurity, the concept of money was woven into our lives, likely as it is in yours.

Maybe you’re just starting a family and working the “grind” to provide and are starting to think about saving up for retirement. Or perhaps you are retired and often consider whether you have “enough” or what budgetary limitations you might have to set to make what you have last until…

Or, you are like Lindsay and I, somewhere in between.

Regardless, money is a topic that starts and ends wars, relationships, and marriages. It is perhaps the only “necessary evil” in the world in that money, or a lack thereof has always impacted the human condition.

If you don’t believe me, turn on any news in any part of the world. (OK, that’s a bad idea… just keep reading this instead!).

So how do we (Chris and Lindsay, or you) learn to navigate such a complicated world where evils are necessary to live, or at minimum, to survive?

I’ll share a quick story that has been on my heart since I first stepped into it.

Because Lindsay and I have not always had a lot, we are very careful to manage what we have—both money in the bank and our possessions. This is partly why we were so devastated by the freak hail storm in Nebraska that totaled our car (the nicest thing we have ever owned!).

With so little to our names, but knowing Jesus personally, we have always been stewards of what we have and generous in giving or trying to give to others.

Our first year on the road, as we drove a meandering route to the Arctic Ocean, we wanted to serve others in every state we visited. I wrote the book (OK, a manuscript I still promise to start sharing one day) about how we fell on our faces in this attempt.

But the idea was that we were blessed with what little we had, and we wanted to share this blessing with others as we wandered.

In the first year, incidentally, we received far more from others than we gave. And yes, for a short while, I kept a journal to try and keep track of the miracles that took place in this beautiful interaction between us and someone else.

Whether we were the givers or recipients, we formed bonds with people—most of whom now remain strangers to us, but some may be reading this now as friends.

We’ve always wanted to be generous—abundantly generous. That is why we started a business on the road, praying we could build it into a giving machine.

Sure, we want financial security and simple comforts—like an RV that we know won’t break down (we still haven’t “made it” there yet!).

But we have always viewed our call to wander as one God has given us distinctively and purposefully to serve others while living a pretty good life along the way.

Yet, over the years, we have struggled with money. Twice, we found ourselves “stuck” with just a few thousand dollars to our name, and we needed more than we had to get “unstuck.” A handful of amazing people blessed us during that time, and with their help, we crawled out of those two mires.

We never forgot about their generosity - and if you are one of these people, we still hold your giving close to heart - but we always found ourselves living on the fringe of catastrophe.

We don’t live “paycheck to paycheck” as we work seasonally, and paychecks come and go like the wind. So we, like our more primitive ancestors (and squirrels!), have learned to forage while the foraging is good and to save and live modestly through difficult times.

There is never “extra” in this nomadic lifestyle. You pile away the nuts you can when you can and hope there are enough to get you through winter.

I have always told people that if we felt called by God to come off the road to pursue a more “stable” or “traditional” life with jobs that “pay well” and so forth, we would follow in an instant.

But that call has yet to come. (Though I did apply for a job the first week of July that would have necessitated our return to Florida if I had landed it… still, crickets on that response.)

What has come is the sense that as we come to know Jesus more, we are challenged more in our view and perspective of money and what it means and does for us.

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Two days after I learned that I had been “promoted” back to my old management job here in Custer State Park, I learned terrifying news about one of my former server colleagues whom I now supervise.

Like most of the seasonal hospitality industry in the United States, much of our staff is from out of the country. In this case, the Caribbean island from which this server was from was recently ravaged by a large hurricane and she had gone over a week without hearing from her children’s caretaker.

Like so many people I meet in this seasonal line of work, this woman had left her two young children at home to pursue the opportunity to work in the United States. And like many other women from her country, she was a single parent who relied on paying a caretaker to watch her children while she was away for months.

Imagine that life where you would intentionally leave your children behind to pursue the means to support them better! Then you spend seven days wondering and worrying about their safety and whether they were harmed by the hurricane that all news reports in the US show such a grave catastrophe.

When she finally heard back after the storm, everything was mostly OK when the power was restored. Unlike the giant treasure chest the US opens during national catastrophes, this nation relied on its own people to rebuild what was lost. The good news is that the rebuilding had begun, and she was able to reconnect with her children.

However, two days after that, she learned that her children’s caretaker had abandoned them, leaving the house empty of food and no adult supervision to tend to the children.

My heart broke in this moment. In one of the many times in my life I wished I had more means to help her. I wished I had more money or could instead go where help was needed and provide what help was needed.

Writing this, and perhaps in your reading, you may realize this is what is known as a “savior complex.” It is a way of thinking that leads one to think that they, and they alone, can fix what is broken in any situation.

I could not fix this situation from Custer, South Dakota. However, I could help my staff member put food on the shelves for her children when she left later that night to return home.

My heart told me to give her everything I had then, which was not much because I had yet to make anything as a server, and no paychecks had arrived anyway. My head told me to withdraw from any thought of giving. It might interfere with our work relationship or lead others to ask or assume I had enough to do the same for them. After all, who doesn’t need money?

I called Lindsay immediately and asked her what she thought we should do.

“Give her what we can.“

Lindsay has the beautiful blessing of having less conflict between her heart and head than I do. So when she speaks like this, I immediately resolve to act.

I did not check our bank account or flip open my wallet. Although I have spreadsheets for everything, including budgeting, I did not consult my budget to see what we had or what might be due to us because of my promotion back into management.

I simply asked the young woman if she would be OK with us giving her some money and how best to do so.

I left it at that, wiring her money that my head told me would go toward this or that in my own life, but which my heart said was “enough.”

Then, she boarded the plane late that night and returned to her children, with a seven-day window to make things work out before she returned to back here to continue to try to provide for her family.

Ten days later, my first paycheck hit the bank. As I stared at the paystub, weighing what the government had taken for itself and evaluating what was left over, I tried to figure out the proper amount to “tithe.”

Of all the things Jesus said about money, He never said anything about tithing—and certainly not the 10% that seems standard vocabulary in Christian circles. Somewhere along the line someone made that number up and the Church decided to run with it.

I struggled so hard to try to define what amount from that check should go toward the spiritual and practical needs of others. And, as strange as it may sound, I even debated whether I should “pay ourselves back” what I had just given the young woman from the paycheck I had just received.

I realized it was nonsense trying to calculate what giving should or should not be. In all of the years I have been alive, particularly in the last ten years of marriage with Lindsay and even more pronounced over the past six years that we have lived on the road, I have never gone without. I have never panhandled on the side of the road. I have never had to steal to eat. I never sacrificed or compromised my values to survive.

What blessing is this? While I always wished that I had just a little bit more… I have always had enough.

I realize now, many words later that you might wonder why I would spend all of this time writing and then sharing these intimate details of our life on the road with you. And specifically, why would I make a point to share something that we gave to someone else?

Is Chris about to ask for money? No.

Does he think he is better than everyone else for giving? No.

Didn’t Jesus condemn the rich for giving so lavishly in public while praising the old woman who gave all she had in private? Yes.

In May 2018, we met a man who challenged us in our journey to share what would otherwise be kept secret publicly.

“How will others know how to live,” he said, “if you don’t “toot your own horn” and show them? If you want to be true influencers (the word had yet to categorize the industry we now belong to), you will have to use your life experience to relate to others.”

So, as I realize this is a sensitive subject (money, and giving, specifically), the point of this story is not to draw attention or glory to ourselves. And it is not to condemn or judge you if you have abstained from generosity in some recent opportunity. .

Rather, as Lindsay and I are moving toward an entirely different way of sharing our lives with you and others, I feel compelled to share this story as a public profession that I put too much faith in what I have and not enough in what I don’t.

As we drive through the hills and Pink Floyd spills out of our windows into the twisting, turning road, I look toward the properties I dream I might once own a piece of, just big enough to park an RV beneath a pole barn or a tiny home that has just enough of what we want.

I picture these places now as clearly as if I were driving that road because something in me wants something more than what I have.

This road reminds me that there are others with far more than I’ll ever have who can do far more for the world than I ever will with what they have that I do not.

But it reminds me that while I’m driving in a 2010 Honda CRV that has been pelted by hail and deemed worthless by our insurance company, there are far more important things in life than owning a mountain.

Two such things are this doctor’s appointment we’re leaving and the job I’m returning to on this drive.

This story is not to toot a horn (though, if you know me, I’m pretty good at tooting!). And it is not even to challenge you to step up in whatever giving you may or may not be doing.

Rather, it is to remind me and inspire you to look at your contentment in life and find peace in the moments when you realize that you have enough - even if it doesn’t feel that way.

You might be struggling now to make ends meet. Or maybe you are trying to live on a fixed income as prices all around you skyrocket. Perhaps you’ve found yourself fortunate to have a job that makes ends meet, but you are worried that you might lose that job in the coming months…

“Money, it’s a crime

Share it fairly, but don’t take a piece of my pie.

Money, so they say,

Is the root of all evil today.”

We work hard for what we have. And we don’t take for granted that all of our wealth is a blessing. Our prayer for you today is that whatever money means to you, in whatever form it takes, it does not preoccupy the parts of your heart that prevent you from seeing that what you have is more than enough and that, with those same eyes, you can see others in need that you may not have seen before.

As Lindsay and I continue on our endless journey, our call to wander that seems to lead us toward no particular end, it is my prayer for us that we remain the same as you.

If we can inspire you or those you know or help you see how you are meant to live more abundantly, we are humbled to journey through life with you.

With love,
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Chris & Lindsay + Everest + Huckleberry!

PS - We are asking now that you forward this or any of our recent updates to anyone you know who might benefit from getting to know us and our call to wander. We are humbled that you have taken the time to remain a part of our journey, and we appreciate you helping us reach the kind of people we hope to inspire, encourage, and inform on how to live a life less ordinary in pursuit of an Abundant life.

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