One Christian's Journey through Racism to Financial Security

By Earl C. Johnson

In this book, I share with you a little about myself. How I grew up and my meager beginning while being raised by my grandparents back in Cincinnati, Ohio. The lack of financial management training I received while growing up and my unawareness to my condition of lower-class living. I give you some insight into some of my struggles with racism while in the military and the effects it had on me navigating the military's system of advancement. How some military personnel believed that race was a determining factor in a person's capacity to do certain jobs and, consequently, shouldn't have equal access to promotions and opportunities. I share multiple scriptures with you as proof positive that God, the creator of heaven and Earth, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords, is our source; and it is He who gives us, the believers, the power to gain wealth. The Parable of the Talent in the book of Matthew and the Parable of the Minas in the book of Luke are solid evidence that God expects us to be good servants of the money He blesses us with. And I also share with you my six-step financial management system that will help any believer who follows it to become financially secure and a good servant of the money God has and will bless you with. The six-step financial management system is sequential--meaning, you start with the first step, and you don't progress to the second step until the first step is complete. Doing so will ensure you have built a financial foundation that will not be shaken or destroyed by the tests, trials, and tribulations we all experience in this world. It ends with answering three questions about retirement: When do you start preparing for retirement? How much money will you need for retirement? And what does your retirement look like? This is the first book and it will serve as a financial foundation to those who absorb its contents. To you, that have ears to hear, if you read and believe you will achieve your financial goals. It is the will of God!

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886167573

Book preview

Lack of Financial Management Training

Money is actually a good thing, but it is not something that we must love or lust after. Here is some good news: God is our source for the money we need and want. Let me say that again, God is our source for the money we need and want. Most people either have not heard this bold, and absolutely true, statement before, or they have heard it and don’t believe it or don’t know how it works. However, if you believe in God, and you believe His Word is true, you need to get ahold of the messages contained in this book and set sail toward your life of abundant living. Deuteronomy 8:18 (KJV) reads, But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth. So again, I say, God is our source for the money we need and want. What we should understand is that God has certain expectations of His children and He rewards His children for following His commandments. We see that 1 John 3:22 (KJV) says, And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.

It is painfully obvious that in most poor and middle-class neighborhoods, there isn’t much teaching or mentoring about how to manage money. Most people do, however, understand the need for money and some even display an intense desire to acquire it by any means necessary. The O’JAYS captured this ungodly desire, or LOVE of money in their classic song which they titled For the Love of Money. In the song, they sang about people stealing from their loved ones, lying and cheating, women selling their bodies, and doing all sorts of wrong to get money.

The words of the song are eye-opening, and they expose some of the shameful things people will do to get their hands on that almighty dollar. It implies that people will go to great lengths to acquire money and the legal, illegal, moral, or immoral things they will do to get it. Additionally, I want to point out the closeness to actual biblical scripture in this song. We see that 1 Timothy 6:10 (KJV) reads, For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. It is interesting, and very important to note that God is not saying that money is evil—which some people have incorrectly interpreted this verse to say. He is saying that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. There is a huge different between money itself being evil, and the love of money, being evil. The title of this song is For the Love of Money—the title aligns with God’s Word so the O’JAYS got this right. However, there are some lyrics in the song that doesn’t include the word love of money, which makes those particular lyrics not true statements. Except for this important detail, the O’JAYS did a very good job highlighting God’s Word about misplaced love. I want to reemphasize that money is not the root of all evil; it is the LOVE of money that God warns us about. The love or lust of money will cause people to do evil and that is the problem.

The most obvious reason, there isn’t much teaching or mentoring on how to manage money in most poor and middle-class communities is because there are very few (if any) qualified to teach on this subject. Typically, the adults living in these communities have not received any money management training/skills themselves. Those that do normally leave these communities or keep their knowledge to themselves for fear of condemnation for their success and knowledge. I mean, if someone tries to teach the poor about something they typically don’t have, most just don’t listen or become skeptical if it is something they don’t understand. I know people who kept their money in mattresses or hidden away in books, Bibles, clothes, drawers, etc. I remember being told by relatives that whenever they died that we should search the house and all their belongings for money they had hid for safekeeping and later use—it was their emergency fund. These people, like my grandparents, didn’t have a bank account because they didn’t believe in banks or trust them with their money. I guess, in part, that was a carryover from the wild west days when bank robbers would rob the bank and people would lose their hard-earned money. Back in those days, bank customers could only recover their money if they caught the bank robbers. But then, in 1933, the federal government established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which became insurance for bank customers’ money. So if the bank lost the money for some reason, the banks’ customers wouldn’t lose their deposits.

Because I was raised in that environment, I understand their fear of banks. But that fear is based on ignorance, and it’s not aligned with the Word of God. The primary way to overcome their fears is to feed them the knowledge needed for understanding and to be presented in an acceptable manner to promote cultural change. This type of cultural thinking and attitude about the financial system is very difficult to overcome. In fact, ANY type of cultural change is hard to overcome, but it can be done provided you have the right motivation. So what is culture change?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Culture change is a term used in public policy making that emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior. It has been sometimes called repositioning of culture, which means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society. It places stress on the social and cultural capital determinants of decision making and the manner in which these interact with other factors like the availability of information or the financial incentives facing individuals to drive behavior.

These cultural capital influences include the role of parenting, families and close associates; organizations such as schools and workplaces; communities and neighborhoods; and wider social influences such as the media. It is argued that this cultural capital manifests into specific values, attitudes or social norms which in turn guide the behavioral intentions that individuals adopt in regard to particular decisions or courses of action. These behavioral intentions interact with other factors driving behavior such as financial incentives, regulation and legislation, or levels of information, to drive actual behavior and ultimately feed back into underlying cultural capital.

In general, cultural stereotypes present great resistance to change and to their own redefinition. Culture, often appears fixed to the observer at any one point in time because cultural mutations occur incrementally. Cultural change is a long-term process. Policymakers need to make a great effort to improve some basics aspects of a society’s cultural traits.

As you can see from this Wikipedia definition, the social and cultural behaviors of individuals and communities sometimes need to change. This change can be influenced by parenting, families, close associates, schools, etc. But in general, creating culture change is difficult because it usually is encountered with great resistance.

The Bible tells us in Matthew 19:26 (KJV), But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible. This means that even cultural change is possible with God.

When I was working at the car wash, I had extra money. So based on what I had been taught, I spent my money to buy clothes and shoes—the things I needed to support the dress to impress attitude most teenagers had while growing up in the city. However, contrary to what I learned, I also opened up a bank savings account. It was a Christmas savings account that I was talked into by a bank teller who was cashing my checks from the car wash—this was my initial exposure to understanding that just by letting the right person or institution use my money for a certain time period I could earn compounding interest.

Compound interest is when the interest you earn on a balance in a savings or investing account is reinvested, earning you more interest. I don’t know who said it, but I heard that a wise man once said, Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money. I also heard that compounding interest was the eighth wonder of the world, and I believe it. Compounding interest is a great tool for you to learn, keep and use out of your toolbox. Now, it was a bank teller, whom I didn’t know outside of the bank, who shared this knowledge with me. However, this information would have been of greater impact in my earlier life if it had come from those entrusted with my upbringing. In fact, according to the Word of God, it is the responsibility of those entrusted individuals to share financial knowledge with their children. In the following paragraphs, I will commentary the precepts of Proverbs 22:5–7 (NKJV), which reads, Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse: He that kept his soul shall be far from them. Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it. The rich rules over the poor; And the borrower is servant to the lender. These verses explain clearly the Lord wants us to stay away from criminal activities and become a lender and not the borrower.

It is that criminal element that Proverbs 22:5 (NKJV) is addressing when it says, Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse: He that kept his soul shall be far from them. So what God is saying here is that if you try and take the criminal route to financial gain, there will be thorns and snares or weapons in the way to prevent the criminal from succeeding. We have all heard the adage Crime doesn’t pay; well, there was a time in my life that I didn’t believe that saying. As I looked around my environment, there were lots of criminal activities, but you were only considered a criminal if you got caught. If you got away with it—it was cool, and there was admiration rather than shame for those who survived the actions without getting caught. Of course, it nearly always ended up that the person who got away with the previous criminal acts would get caught doing something else at a later time. God goes on to say, He that kept his soul shall be far from them. Another way to say this, it is a much smarter choice to stay far away from the criminal element and criminal activities.

Growing up in an environment such as I did usually does not prepare a person for building a legal financially secure future. What normally happens is that the people in poor communities fall victim to the thorns and snares talked about in Proverbs 22:5. Now, there is a multitude of reasons why some people remain in poverty and can’t seem to get out of it—in fact, there are some people who prefer to remain in poverty because it is what they know and it is comfortable to them. Here in America, there are welfare programs that incentivize the poor to remain poor and these programs become part of the culture in many families. In my opinion, while the ideas behind these types of programs originated out of compassion and I unreservedly agree with and endorse them, the administration of these programs has been a major failure which should be corrected. My thoughts on this subject are, since there are always going to be an endless supply of poor people (Jesus said in Mark 14:7 [NKJV], For you have the poor with you always), social and welfare programs should be designed to support cultural change about work rather than become an incentive to not work. I could write a book on this issue alone, so I do not plan to address it here. I will instead address the lack of financial management training as a root cause of people remaining in poverty and not obtaining financial security.

Proverbs 22:6 (NKJV) reads, Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it. But who will train the children on how to break out of poverty and achieve financial security? Will it be those relatives and friends we grow up with? Typically, they are not the ones children will learn financial management lessons from because they have the same cultural barriers and lack of training. Will it be the public-school systems that the poor and lower middle class usually attend? Again, typically not, as they don’t usually have courses about how to manage money as part of the curriculum. What is taught in most families and schools is that a person should acquire the education to qualify for a job, to buy the things he wants, and become financially responsible, e.g., to pay for the services and merchandise received. This is great teaching, but it is different from being trained to achieve financial security.

For a lot of people, getting ahold of money is more like a competition. They become jealous about the success of others, and they even go so far as to take/steal because of their sinful coveting. There is an old idiom, keeping up with the Joneses, that suggest some people will use their neighbor as a benchmark for social success or the accumulation of material goods. While I was growing up, it was part of the culture amongst the people I knew to live beyond one’s means. They would procure the latest, greatest, and most expensive merchandise at the sacrifice of not being able to pay their bills—like rent and electricity was normal. I know people who have been evicted from their homes for being behind on their rent, and they owned a relatively new Cadillac, which they didn’t drive much because they didn’t have money for gasoline. However, when they did come across some gas money for the car, you couldn’t tell them that they didn’t look good behind the wheel of that clean and shiny new car. That is irrational behavior, but it happens because they have not been taught to be financially responsible, and they don’t have a clue about how to become financially secure.

Of course, there are exceptions, but these people are just that, exceptions to the norm. People who fall into this exception’s categorization are those who can find a way to make it out of poverty and stay out. Some of these exceptional people find their way out of poverty through sports, a few by way of academic excellence, others by smart career choices, but most only make it out by the grace of God. These people can be looked to as examples on how to make money using your own God-given talents, but only a few of them can be looked to on how to manage the money that God has graced them with. This is true because even when people escape poverty through one of the ways mentioned above and start down the path to achieving their American dream, some will fall back into their previous condition because they lack the knowledge it takes