When Buying a Red Hat

When I first read Quiana’s article, I couldn’t help but remember times in my life when I’ve made decisions out of selfishness. Times when I’ve lived as though my money is my own to use as I want. This article freshly challenged me to recognize all that I have as belonging to Christ.

As Quiana shares this story about her red hat and the lesson it taught her, I pray that you too, will be challenged. Challenged to surrender all that you have to Christ, and to live under the reality that all you have has been given generously, and underservedly to you by God. 

 

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We live in a society blessed with freedom – freedom of so many different kinds, one of which is the freedom to choose.

Every day we make dozens of choices – what to wear, what to eat, where to go, who we’ll spend our time with. Making choices and having options has become so second nature that we often forget it’s a freedom at all. We forget that other people, in other places, don’t have the freedom to choose. That most have only one option of what to wear or what to eat; that some don’t get to eat or to have clothes at all. 

Not us. We get to choose. But with that ability comes the responsibility to make good choices. Choices that will benefit not just us, but also those around us. Choices that will bring glory to the God we serve.

Let’s talk about one of those choices:

How will we spend our money?

This is a choice we make almost every day and it comes with no end of options – from education to travel, food and clothes to movie tickets. As young women, we aren’t lacking in opportunities to spend our money, but we don’t always spend it well. This article isn’t long enough for me to categorize all your potential purchases as either a ‘good choice’ or a ‘bad choice’. However, I want to give you something even better, a tool that I hope will help you discern that for yourself.

The Day I Bought My Red Hat

I smiled as I looked up at the red-felted brim. Turning my eyes onto the silver glass of the mirror before me, I paused to appreciate the strip of black ribbon that encircled the crown. It was perfect!

It was also twenty dollars.

I lifted the hat from my head and turned it over in my hands. It’s more than I wanted to pay. If I wait it will probably go on sale. They were good objections; objections that I quickly reasoned away. When a thing’s in style you just have to pay the price. I had passed by similar hats before only to find them gone when I came back later, hoping to have found them on sale.

My mind made up, I placed the hat on top of the other items in my basket and didn’t give it another thought. 

At least, I didn’t right then. I think about that purchase quite often now. It isn’t just the hat, it’s value or lack thereof, it’s how buying that hat related to an event that was to follow.

As I was leaving the store, my new hat in hand, I walked past a person holding a sign. A sign asking something of me. It read, hungry and homeless. I paused, opened my wallet, and handed him a five-dollar bill.

I felt quite proud of myself as I quickly retreated to my car. But the feeling of satisfaction didn’t last long – a moment, maybe two – just until my eyes fell upon the maroon-red hat I held in my hands.

The Moral of the Story

I have owned that hat for several years now. It hangs on a hook by my bed. I can count the times I have worn it on one hand. It’s still pretty and I still really like it, it just isn’t the most practical purchase I’ve ever made. But you know what, I consider that hat to be worth every dollar that I spent on it. Not in and of itself, but due to the lesson that God used it to teach me.

I gave the man who was sitting outside the store that day five dollars. I felt like I was supposed to give him something, but I didn’t want to give too much. Why?

I know why I felt prompted to give him something, Matthew 5:42 says, “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.” But why was I worried about giving too much?

I have often been told that you shouldn’t give money to people you meet begging on the street. I’ve been told that most use it for alcohol and drugs, so the money may do them harm instead of good. So I could say that five-dollars was a prudent gift and if he did waste it, well, at least it was just five dollars. But if I’m honest, that is no more than a convenient excuse. It wasn’t for his sake that I gave him five dollars instead of twenty and I wasn’t really worried about him wasting good money. After all, I had just spent twenty dollars on a hat, with little worry – proving that I was willing to waste money myself.

So, the question remains: Why? Why was I worried about giving ‘too much’?

The answer is simple: I was being selfish.

If we’re honest, selfishness plays a role in a lot of our money- spending decisions. Our purchases are usually made in light of what we want or what we think we need. 

Our giving is also tainted by it. 

Selfishness can be present in giving little, as it was in the story I just told you, but it can also be the motivation for someone to give in abundance. A ‘generous’ person, if motivated by a desire to be seen or to feel good about themselves, is nothing more than a selfish person in disguise. Because true generosity is giving for the sake of another, not to get something for yourself.  

Is it Bad to be Selfish with Our Money?

It is our money after all. Isn’t it?

Well, not really. Everything we have comes from God. In Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). As Christians, we are bought with a price and that means that we are God’s and not our own (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). So, if we don’t belong to ourselves, it is only reasonable to conclude that our money is not really ours either.

But let’s suppose, for just a minute, that it was ours. That we had every right to the money we’ve earned for ourselves and to be selfish with it. Should we?

That isn’t how God treated us. God, the only one who has a right and a reason to be selfish, freely shared the things that were His. He shared them with us generously – for our sake not His own. 

“He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)

God is never selfish with the things that are His. So how can we be? How can we, as no more than stewards of what He has given us, say that it is our right to use those resources frivolously on ourselves, or to withhold them from others?

That is not to say that every time someone asks you for money you need to give them every cent in your wallet. Nor that you can never buy something pretty unless it is both practical and on sale. But our financial choices are meant to be marked with generosity, not frivolity. Our money is meant to be spent to the glory of God alone. 

Every time I put on that red hat, I am challenged to be more concerned about living frivolously than giving frivolously. Meaning that I would rather be overly generous than allow selfishness to control the decisions I make. 

As a general rule for spending, I hope you will be motivated by a desire to give rather than a desire to get and before you go to use your money, I hope you’ll remember that you already have all you could ever need – in Christ.

 

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It was a school assignment that first caused Quiana Casamayor to pick up her pencil and write a story. She never stopped. That story was followed by another, then another, and eventually she began to try her hand at non-fiction articles – like this one – as well. Quiana had started writing for fun, swept away by an active imagination. Now, she desires to write for the glory of Jesus Christ, challenging others to fully surrender their lives to Him. To find more of her writing and to support her work by subscribing, go to Written Lives Blog.