Redemptive Real Estate

Everybody has a worldview, a way of looking at, reacting to, and navigating this life. As its truths become second nature, our thinking starts to change. Our priorities change. Our perspective, attitude, and actions change with them.

My worldview is faith based. It has opened my heart further in service to "the least of these" and changed how I think about the real estate, knowledge, relationships, and other resources placed in our hands.

We may think of ourselves as owners. Yet property can also hold us in chains when it owns our attention, courage, and judgment.

Why give back?

Philanthropy is a private initiative for the public good, focused on quality of life. For me, it is the desire to promote the welfare of others through generous gifts to worthy causes. But the word alone does not explain why we should act.

Our North American journey to freedom

Those of us in the United States and Canada have inherited a privileged position in free and democratic societies. Families continue to uproot a known way of life and take a chance on an unknown future here. Some arrive as immigrants looking for opportunity. Others arrive as refugees carrying horrific stories.

As many of us age, we begin our own historical journey through parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. With the records now available to us, we can see how our own way of life was built. Many of our relatives were immigrants too. They arrived hungry, without money, and with a dream. They cleared land and built lives by hand. In wartime, they answered the call to defend freedoms at home and abroad.

The generations before us endured world wars, the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, smallpox and polio, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The point is not a count of tragedies. It is perspective. The pursuit of freedom has never been free.

We continue to be blessed

The freedoms we enjoy came at enormous expense to the men and women who fought and worked to give us a better life. From their efforts, the United States and Canada protect basic human rights through their constitutions, laws, and commitments to human dignity.

Those rights include meeting basic needs, protecting vulnerable people from abuse, standing up to corruption, freedom of speech and religion, equal opportunity, access to education, environmental protection, and standards that hold governments accountable. We still fall short, and every marketplace of life carries difficult stories. Yet those imperfections do not erase the inheritance or our responsibility for it.

When does success become significance?

There is more to life than being set for life. Success adds value to ourselves. Significance begins when we add value to others.

As a society, we often build identity around our strengths, recognition, property, and wealth. Then the questions get harder. Do pleasures and passions begin to own us? Do our fantasies about future happiness bring fulfillment? What are affluent American and Canadian societies chasing? Is it vanity and a grasp for the wind?

People's motivations and desires drive what matters. Money is a form of equity. By itself, it does not create significance.

I do not believe God put us here to be ordinary. Our goals need to connect and resonate emotionally.

Heart change

Even as we celebrate our inherited freedom and abundance, North America faces difficult questions involving Indigenous affairs, the sanctity of life, education, speech, gender, addiction, parental rights, religious freedom, poverty, and housing. Technology also gives us a direct view of war, hunger, persecution, and man's inhumanity to man around the world.

Do we, because of our abundance, carry a moral responsibility toward people less fortunate in our countries and abroad?

Rather than turn away, we can grow by entering the pain of society. The greatest significance and treasure may be found by going where the dragon lives. Hope is not someone else's strategy. Where there is collective hope, there is courage. A full life asks us to be intentional and unafraid of outcomes that others may call failure.

For older baby boomers, that also means helping create the next generation of leaders. We are made to be relational, not mechanical.

Our final destination

My faith teaches me to aim at Heaven and to remember, as Philippians 3:20 does, that our citizenship is there. If I aim only at earth, I eventually lose the meaning of both. We are all flying toward a final destination. Once that truth becomes real, we can enjoy the time left on earth in a new and wonderful way.

We are called to love God with our minds, bodies, and souls, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. While we are here, we are expected to give our best in service to our families, our faith communities, and "the least of these." Earthly achievements and pleasures will not satisfy on their own because we were made for eternity.

Hebrews 11:13 describes people of faith as foreigners and temporary residents on earth. That language changes the way I see a deed, a balance sheet, and every other possession. We are stewards for a time, not permanent holders.

Wealth is a temporary resource. We can use what God has put in our hands for permanent good.

That leads me to two personal questions: What problems are around me? What has my life given me as preparation to become part of the solution?

Giving from our abundance

Wealth can leave us regretting too much focus on work, too little attention to family, talking instead of listening, or being absent when we were needed. So I keep returning to the questions beneath the balance sheet:

• How much is too much?
• How much is excess?
• How much is enough?
• How much is too little?
• How much is presumption?

I cannot serve God and money. I can serve God with money. Proverbs 10:22 reminds me that the riches of God's people are fruits of His blessing. God's love is not based on me. It is placed on me. Joy is living with wonder, gratitude, and hope. It is not simply the pursuit of happiness. It is happiness in the pursuit.

Who is my neighbor, and where is the need close enough for me to enter it? I cannot change everything, but I can change something. What I love determines what I see. Self-sufficiency is a myth perpetuated by pride and temporary success.

We have been blessed to witness firsthand many good-news stories of individuals and organizations giving real estate and other resources from their abundance to ministry initiatives.

Give while you live

If we could see the future truth, how would we act today?

Job 1:21 brings the balance sheet back to first principles: we enter this life without possessions and leave it the same way. Wealth is a tool to be used for God's purposes. It is not to be hoarded, stockpiled, or worshipped.

There is little reason to delay every act of giving. It is a lot more fun to give while you live than to give after death.

We cannot change everything, but we can change something. We can find the need close enough to understand and bring the experience, time, money, property, or relationships we are prepared to contribute.

The final truth for me is that God continues to move His people homeward. If that is so, there is thoughtful logic in using part of the treasure He has entrusted to us while we are still here to see it at work.

Indecision is a decision.