Where there is no life insurance

The story of the storehouse that was too small

*Note: this post is part of a series on how living in Eurasia affected my understanding of the Bible. Please head over to the top of my post on “Birthday Cake for Chickens” to catch my disclaimer if you haven’t yet!

¹³ Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” ¹⁴ Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” ¹⁵ Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” ¹⁶ And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. ¹⁷ He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ ¹⁸ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. ¹⁹ And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ ²⁰ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ ²¹ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Luke 12:13-21

One of the parables that impacted me in a new way after living in Eurasia is the story of the man whose storehouse is too small for his epic harvest one year. He thinks about what he should do. 

Now this part of the story isn’t obvious to us as Americans. What should you do if you have more income than what you need to cover expenses… Secure it? Invest it? But when I read this story aloud in the language of the Eurasian country where I lived, it hit me in a different way. There are two principles to keep in mind here: people live in community, not in a vacuum; and people have a more communal and long-term perspective on money. 

The automatically assumed backdrop for any Eurasian story is a community. The man who has a big harvest doesn’t live in a vacuum. He has neighbors. Some of them might not have done as well as he did with their crops that year. He has hired hands who did most of the work to bring in that extra-large harvest, and he’s called a “rich man” in verse 16, so he probably has house help who depend on him for their well-being. He most certainly has a huge family. If he grew up on a farm, he probably has a bunch of siblings who are trying to run farms of their own nearby. He probably has relatives in another town who don’t have a harvest at all.

Someone in his community is throwing a wedding this year and needs money. Someone is about to have a funeral. Someone will need extra medical care. This year he can be the “rich uncle” and pitch in to help others; maybe in another year when he doesn’t do as well, someone else will do that for him. He is part of a larger unit than himself. (Think back to the explanation of how communal-culture family economics works in the story of the Syrophoenician woman.) 

When a Eurasian reads this story, it’s very obvious to them that the man should have shared what he had with others. A man’s life is bigger than himself and his stomach. He has relationships; he has a reputation to build; he has a legacy to think about. The man in the parable decided to store up all his grain and his goods for his own future, but grain and goods are useless if not eaten, traded, or planted. If the man tries to keep things for himself, he will eventually die and lose it all. Instead, he should “be rich toward God” and not toward himself. 

The Eurasians have a saying that God provides the guest’s portion. They save the best they have to put before their guests, because they believe if they have extra, it was meant for a guest anyway. I don’t mean to idealize the culture here. Yes, there is still greed and selfishness in Eurasia just like anywhere else. But people have a more communal and long-term sense of money.

Just one example is the way they pay for weddings. In a typical American wedding, the bride’s family pays for the party, the groom’s family pays for the honeymoon, and the guests provide the “dowry” (furniture, dishes, linens for the house, etc) via the registry. But in Eurasia, those roles are reversed. The bride’s family provides the dowry, the groom’s family provides a home for them to live in (usually together with the groom’s parents), and the guests bring monetary gifts to cover the cost of the party. (The family puts a down payment on a restaurant, and all through the reception, the guests drop cash into a box. At the end of the night, the host of the party counts the money and pays the balance to the restaurant. Whatever cash is left over is given to the couple to help them start their lives together.) The family hosting the wedding registers all the guests and their gift amounts in a notebook. Then the family keeps that notebook for decades. When someone in the notebook is hosting a wedding, the family will look up how much that person gave at their own event, and make sure to give at least the same amount in return. This is a long-term system of reciprocity and a way to ensure that families have the extra money they need from the community at the time when they are most in need of it. 

Another example of how the communal economic system works is the “lotto.” People have a hard time saving money because it’s seen as selfish to set aside money for one’s own future when others have an immediate need. However, they know that it’s easier not to spend money they don’t have. So many times, relatives or neighbors who trust each other will organize a “lotto.” They write a list of participants, say 10 people, and decide on an amount, like the local equivalent of $60– that’s roughly 10-25% of an average laborer’s monthly salary). Every month, those 10 people will each contribute $60 of their salary to the pool. Then the group will draw one of the 10 names, and give the $600 they collected to that person. (Each person tends to have something planned for that money, like a home remodeling project or a new appliance, that they do right away when their name is drawn.) They continue that process until each of the participants has received their $600.

When I first heard about that system, I thought it was pointless. No one gains or loses any money– why don’t they just each save up their own $600 over 10 months? But now I understand that it’s easier to hang onto money if it’s not in their hands to begin with. What they gain by “playing the lotto” is an element of long-term control over their money that they couldn’t have (at least not in good conscience) by hoarding it under the mattress. When a relative in need knocks on the door, and they have the money in hand, they’re going to share it.

God provides my portion through you today; he provides your portion through me tomorrow. Eurasians understand that long-term plans don’t always work out the way we think they will, and it’s best to share what we have today instead of trying to control the future too much. They’re not great at saving up for themselves, but they are magnanimous hosts and generous toward their family members who are in need.

This parable challenged me to think about just how much I really do need to be saving up for my own future. What is “prudence,” and what is just my American upbringing pushing the pendulum too far to the individualistic side?