Debt and salvation

From March 15 to May 15 I think about one thing.....DEBT.

Why?

In the good 'ol USA, tax day is April 15. And, I never have the money I need paid into cover my taxes. You see, as a minister I have to pay self employment tax. And while minister taxes work very well for dual income homeowners, or pastors that have a brood of children, it does not work well for single pastors trying to work out of car debt and school debt and previous tax debt.

This year, I have been thinking about other kinds of debt as well. Sleep debt. Time debt. Debt of favors I might owe someone. Financial debt is only one kind of debt. And there are some times I feel like I am running behind in all sorts of ways.

Now certain debts are harder to deal with than others. Sleep debt you can only catch up on, but you cannot really save up hours of sleep. As a matter of fact, when you try and do this you tend to end up more tired that when you started.

And work debt, meaning you are behind and owe work more than you can reasonable do in 40 hours, work debt you can work ahead on a little on sometimes. But I rarely if ever do that. When I do this I find out I have just caught up with where I want to.

Then there are friendships where you just feel like, well, you get more out of the friendship that you give in return. I have some friendships like this. I have friends that have helped me with rides somewhere, or giving you hand me down furniture, and you realize that you might never catch up to even with giving back to this person all that they have given to you.

The Bible has this word about debt recovery...and it describes this feeling that I described above. You see, when people were in debt in the old days and they could not get out of debt they ended up in one sort of slavery or another. And they ended up so far behind that they cannot possibly ever catch up.

Once in a while a friend or a relative would be able to recover someone they love from what they owed by paying their debt for them. When a person did this the word they used was redemption.

Redemption is a bible word. It talks about what God does to rescue us from all the things we do to "get behind" in our life due to sin (or doing wrong things) and his desire to set us free.

COME FREEDOM COME.