letters from a stranger

We made too much to have so little to show for it.

I thought that we would always have car payments. I thought to own anything nice, you had to find 18 months same as cash loans. I was a pro at negotiating low interest rates. I had three credit cards but always paid them off the same month. I did a monthly budget in my head, tithed ten percent most months, and tried to stash away as close to ten percent in savings each month, and would then end up using half of it to make up for what we overspent that month. And we were normal.

If you are the nerd, or you just want the numbers, skip to the end. But I’ve found out that personal finance is 20% knowledge, and 80% behavior. The purpose of me writing this is to let you in on how Valorie and I changed our behaviors, how we got creative with how to pay down the debt, and how we have decided to make financial decisions going forward.

I should also mention that before we changed our behaviors, I was the one who handled the finances, and Valorie trusted me to make the decisions. So I take most of the credit for going INTO debt, and give a lot of the credit to Valorie for us getting OUT of debt. You’ll see why in a minute.

We can afford the monthly payments!

At the end of 2015 I changed jobs and had an increase in salary. Valorie also got an increase, so the first thing we did was rack up an additional $10,000 in consumer debt. We had a hot water heater go out, and we decided that we needed a wooden privacy fence to replace our old chain link fence. I decided that with our increase in income, we could afford new monthly payments. It would be tight each month, but we needed the new and very cool tankless water heater right now! And the privacy fence would help our home sell better down the road! And we had job security! I’m also a pro at justifications.

We’re pregnant!

When Valorie told me that we were pregnant, I just sat in shock for 30 minutes. Valorie knows me well enough to give me time to process, but looking back at what should have been one of the happiest moments in life, all I could think about was ‘how in the world are we going to afford this’? We had almost $500 in car payments each month, and another $500 going towards the water heater and fence. It was time to make a change.

The Why.

Before we started this journey, we knew we needed a big and specific WHY for getting out of debt. It would be our motivation to stay intense. We wanted to get rid of stress, increase our communication, increase our ability to be generous, and leave a legacy for our kids.

The “B” word.

Nothing like a Baby to get your Butt in gear to create a Budget. Valorie and I decided that we were going to start meeting together every month before the month began to create a budget. We used everydollar.com since it helped us create a zero-based budget, and with its free iPhone/Android apps, it was easy for us to know how much we could spend that month. It’s worth noting that I had been using Mint.com, but it wasn’t as simple as everydollar, and I wasn’t including Valorie on things. We immediately felt like we got a raise once we started telling our money where to go instead of wandering where it went. It also increased our communication with each other. Double win!

Dumping the debt.

We cut up our credit cards and started our debt snowball. It’s important to know that if you are serious about getting out of debt. You’ve got to be willing to cut the fat. See ya vacations. Nu-uh restaurants. Bye bye impulse spending. Hello rice and beans! Hello date nights at home playing cards! Come on somebody!! We also looked for creative ways to speed up the process.

We cancelled all 401k contributions (great motivation to get out of debt when you’re missing out on the company match!) I started driving for Uber evenings and weekends averaging about $15/hr. Valorie took a second job (even while pregnant!) We shopped around and got cheaper auto/home insurance policies. We negotiated down our internet costs. We sold our couch. I cashed out my Apple stock and cancelled a whole life cash value life insurance policy (after starting a term life policy. More on that later.)

We follow the biblical principle of tithing so we continued to give 10% of our income to our local church throughout the process. This may sound counter productive to give away money while trying to pay down debt, but we saw it jumpstart the principle of sowing and reaping. We saw no lack of what we needed during this time. We also knew it was important to train our hearts to be generous in every stage of life.

Never going back.

We paid off two cars, a tankless water heater, and a privacy fence in six months. The feeling of being debt free is INCREDIBLE. The stress is gone! Valorie and I have eliminated the number one cause for divorce in America today - fights about financial issues. And we know that our baby girl will grow up into a legacy of wealth and generosity instead of debt and greed.

The Numbers.

Ok. Here are the numbers on everything. Debts Chads Car (3yrs old) - $12,000 Valories Car (7yrs old) - $7,000 Fence - $4,000 Hot Water Heater - $2,000 Payoffs Whole Life cash out - $10,000 Stock sell - $4,000 Existing monies in savings account - $1,200 Cutting the budget and extra jobs - $9,800

It’s possible.

And it’s so worth it. It doesn’t matter if your income is 6 figures, or your debt is. You need a why, and you need a plan! You can do it! If you need help, reach out. I’d love to sit down with you to create or look over your existing budget and help you devise a plan.

“Live like no one else, so that later, you can live and give like no one else.” - Dave Ramsey

Tips & Resources

Mortgage - maybe you can refinance to save some money each month. If you’re looking to start a mortgage, make sure its no more than 25% of your take home pay and on a fixed rate 15 yr mortgage or less. Churchhill Mortgage is a great company to get a mortgage with even with no credit score. (Who needs a credit score anyways? More here)

Cars - pay cash! Here is a great way to upgrade over time and eventually drive cars for free.

Whole Life Insurance - also called ‘cash value’ or ‘Variable Universal Life’. These are horrid products. You pay up to 20 times more per month for just a fraction of the coverage. I cancelled my whole life $100/month policy with a $56,000 benefit and started a term policy for $27/month with a $700,000 benefit. A great place to buy term insurance is here.

Stock - while not a bad investment, individual stocks carry a lot of risk. Investing in mutual funds will diversify your risk, and typically carry on average a 12% rate of return over time. If you’re in debt, you may want to go ahead and cash it out and throw it at the debt. You can get back into investing once your financial footing is a bit more stable! More info on how to pick mutual funds here.

The Financial Peace Process - Valorie and I follow Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps.

I wondered what her story was. Did she ever go running through fields of flowers, and have tea parties? Who was her first crush and what was it like to finally catch his attention? What did she used to want to be when she grew up? Did her dreams come to life?

I thought from my context of having a beautiful and wonderful mother. I grew up in a safe home, and I'm still very close to my mom to this day. While she will always be my mom, how radically did her life change when she had me, her firstborn? What was she like when she was my age?

It's striking me as I write this that I know much of my parents from when I was born, but not much of before. There are stories I've never heard.

Part of me thinks that we never really grow up inside. There is still a whimsical child who is captured in awe of their surroundings. I want to go back to that time. It's hard to watch parents get older. I don't want to get married and "grow old together". I think that is too much pain for my heart to bear.

But I know that it will happen, and all to soon. I guess what I'm trying to say is... embrace the process. Our stories are being written and let's never forget where each other came from.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with the idea of forgiving ones self. Of course God forgives and only the purest forgiveness can be found in him, but we, like God, also have the capacity to forgive. Forgiving ourselves and whether or not that is theologically correct is a surface debate at best. It’s addressing the issue with improper verbiage.

If God forgives you, it’s done. In fact, if you’ve already asked for forgiveness and entered into his Kingdom, all your sins have been forgiven past present and future. He’s forgiven your sin NATURE. He’s forgiven who you are! Not just what you’ve done. He’s began to make you someone NEW and BETTER.

But if you “can’t forgive yourself” you are really holding the point that you haven’t fully received his forgiveness. Why? Because you are not completely at home or aware of the love and grace of God. Because there are times we just don’t think we deserve his love, or believe that he can still love us to the extent we’ve heard about or at one time experienced.

Once you realize the power and extent of God’s love and grace… As best as a human can… You can’t help but replace regret and self loathing with joy and excitement. And that will flow into your own forgiving of other people. If you can’t forgive yourself you can’t truly forgive others. You are simply letting them off the hook. Overlooking. And you aren’t unable to enter into true forgiveness.

Forgiveness is washing the feet of your enemies. Forgiveness is taking your bloody wrists and helping wrap the wounds of your assailant. Forgiving yourself is identifying the fault and quickly embracing the fact that God has already forgiven you and has no desire to get you back or make you pay for what you’ve done. Forgiving yourself flows from the forgiveness of God first. Forgiving yourself is a perspective change that allows you to see the opportunity for deeper intimacy with God through the sin.

Usually songwriters write more when times are hard, but it's always been the opposite for me. Some of the greatest songs have been born out of pain and struggle, but I can never seem to finish any during my particular night seasons. So here's the first song I've finished in over nine months... or maybe this song really is a result of the breaking and I just now finally have something nice to say.

I sat down at the piano and these words and chords just kinda spilled out... enjoy

// CALLING ME BY MY REAL NAME words and music by Chad Davis 

you come and you wash my feet you come embracing me a sinner called by your name you come and you wash my feet

you're calling me, you call me by name

you come and you kiss my heart you've given me a brand new start a liar caught by your truth you come and you kiss my heart

you're calling me, you call me by name

and for the first time in a long time I feel loved and for the first time in a long time I feel peace for the first time in a long time I know joy unspeakable joy

  I was told tonight that I have peaceful eyes... I actually think this is kinda cool. Because I believe the eyes are the window to the soul, and I also know that the past several weeks, I have never been more at peace inside, due to the simple fact of abiding in Christ, and becoming poor in spirit, has transformed my perspective to a heavenly view.

Check out a blog I wrote last year about this...

I will never celebrate the death of an enemy. I will not dance like a fool at the so called "justice" of it. I mourn for the deaths both at his hands and ours. Maybe this is a sign that the Christ in me is greater than the fear that permeates our culture and world. - Aaron Yancey

It's a dangerous thing when humans get an appetite for blood. I'm happy for the relief this will bring to the military families that have sacrificed so much, but I don't want to ever be on the side yelling "Crucify Him!" My bloodlust is satisfied at the table of eucharist, and I am thankful for the mercy shown to me. I have not received the justice I deserve, thank God. - Amanda Martin

Im taking donations to buy my sister an iPad2. She’s a full time missionary in Asia (due to security reasons, I cannot mention her name or locations here) and her computer just died of old age. She uses the computer to stay connected with friends and family here in the States, raise support, and uses it in her tutoring as she continues to learn the native language.

The iPad2 is $500 and would be exactly what she needs. Please contact me at [email protected] with ideas or questions. You can donate here. Thank you so much!!

  I got this from Gungor: http://www.gungormusic.com/blog/?p=65

Imagine you were hungry for some pizza, so you do quick Google search for nearby pizza joints.  You discover a new one only a few blocks away from you and it’s called Pete’s Christian Pizza.  And of course the logo is a Christian fish on a pizza.

“What a strange name for a pizza place”, you say to yourself.

“How can pizza be Christian?”

I’m not sure what decision you make at that point.  Me, I probably opt to not go for it.  I figure that if they need to slap Christian lingo on there box to try to sell that pizza, there might be something wrong with that pizza…

Does anybody but me find it not only odd but actually offensive to walk into a record store and see a “Christian and Gospel” section?  Let me explain…

There is no other music that is labeled by the lifestyle choices of the artist or the philosophical or religious content of its lyrics.  There is no “atheist” music section.  There is no “hopeful agnostic” industry.  You don’t walk in looking for the newest Rufus Wainwright cd, only to be pointed to the “gay section in the back.”  That would be ridiculous and offensive.  Why categorize someone’s music by whether that person is gay or straight, republican or democrat, optimistic or pessimistic, or whether or not he or she believes in intelligent life on other planets?  Is it not just as ridiculous to categorize someone’s music by whether they believed that Jesus rose from the dead or not?

I think that having a Christian music section is as silly as having an “heliocentric dog loving Buddhist” section.  So why does it exist?  Why is there only one section of a music store that is defined not by the genre of the music (certainly, KJ-52 does not belong in the same category, musically as Sandy Patty), but by something else…

And what is that something else exactly?  Is it really the lyrical content?  Bono straight up quotes the Bible sometime in his songs.  Bob Dylan used all sorts of biblical imagery along with countless other mainstream writers and artists, and none of these albums are found in the Christian section.  Furthermore, there are albums in the “Christian” section that certainly have nothing about them that would make one think that they are Christian..

Here’s a chorus from a “Christian band” called Five Iron Frenzy:

Don’t worry what this song would say, you’ll never hear it anyway. They won’t play this song on the radio, so far, so bad, that’s how it goes. They’ll pull our records from the shelves, so far, so bad, that’s how it goes.

The record symbolizes the upper room where the disciples started speaking in tongues.  And “the radio” is obviously an overt metaphor about the devil and all his demons…No, of course not, it’s just a song!  Just like any other song that any artist would write with angst that radio stations don’t play him as much as he’d like them to.

So certainly this category of “Christian music” can’t be solely based on lyrical content.

What else could it be based on?  Whether or not the artist is a Christian?  Certainly not, there are plenty of Christians in the other sections, and there are a number of people who are not actually Christians who are in the Christian section, so that can’t be it either.

Um… running out of ideas here…the record label? Well, I’m not even sure what a Christian record label would be defined by, but nearly every Christian record label is actually owned by a larger mainstream label, and all of these companies have people involved in the business that aren’t Christians.  Conversely, there certainly are Christians within mainstream record labels all over the place as well, so that can’t be what defines this category either.

Where this leaves us is that it makes no sense.  But it exists.  So why does it exist?  Well, I will tell you my friend.  Money.  That’s all.

There was (or perhaps used to be) a large enough market segment of the population that would gravitate towards a sign that said “Christian” on it.  I lived in Tulsa for a little while, and trust me, it would be far more likely to see something like “Pete’s Christian Pizza” there than it would be to see it in Denver.  Why?  Because there are enough of the type of Christians that would gravitate towards that fish symbol when making their pizza decisions that it makes commercial sense for Pete to put that fish on that pizza box.  While living in Tulsa, I saw all kinds of businesses with the fish logo on them.  In Denver, you would lose business by doing that, so people generally don’t do that kind of thing here.

So the question that this begs is “so what?”  Who cares if there is a section labeled Christian?  It’s not hurting anybody is it?

Well, actually… I think it does.

There are two specific evils that I’d like to talk about that I think are a direct result of this categorization.

First there is the issue of discrimination.  If a record store had a “gay music” section, people would be infuriated.  Why?  Because it’s discriminatory.  To relegate someone’s art to a small subculture of sub-art simply because that person is gay is wrong.  It hurts that artist.  It hurts all of us.  I think it’s the same with Christian music.  There are plenty of us who are Christian artists who have no desire to simply stay within some CCM ghetto around people that all think the same about everything.  There are plenty of us who are open minded to the thoughts and opinions of others who would love to enter the conversation of our culture not as a superior, bigoted judge of the rest of the world, but as a fellow human being who also has opinions and thoughts about the world that we live in that we love to express through music.

Being placed in the Christian section is the musical equivalent of a pizza company being forced by somebody to call their pizza place “Pete’s Christian Pizza” even if they’d rather not.  Can you see how forcing a business person to label their business a Christian business just because they are a Christian would be discriminatory?  It is the same thing forcing a musician who simply wants to make beautiful and honest music into the Christian category of music.  You might as well paint a scarlet letter across our chests.

Secondly, I think that this categorization hurts the art.  Because this category exists, it comes with baggage.  Imagine if you were a Republican, and you really believed Republican values, but you found out that if you wanted to make a record that it would be placed in the small Republican Music section in the back of the store.  That might effect how you make the music…  If you are going to make a “Republican record” as opposed to simply making a record as a Republican, it would probably effect the art.  In fact, it might have a tendency to overtake the art and turn it into Republican propaganda.  The music becomes secondary to the message, which means the music is probably going to suck.  You can only rhyme “Limbaugh” with so many things after all…

The past couple of months, the Lord has really renewed in me a passion for intercession, and worship. They both have become as real and as vital as the very blood in my veins. A day without intercession and worship leaves me anemic.

Dust last night, and small group tonight has only fanned the flame so that I'm pretty sure I have 3rd degree burns on my lungs and my hands.

Today I became overwhelmed with compassion towards a person in a seemingly hopeless physical illness situation, and it fueled inside of me a holy anger towards the devil and his work. I began interceding, and proclaiming the power and goodness of God over the situation. I prayed not only for physical healing, but for spiritual awakening, wholeness, and for God to receive audacious glory. This way of praying was rekindled last night by Teddy when he brought the word to the dust community.

There is too much at stake here in the battle. I am not proclaiming war, for the war has already been raging long before I got here. I am joining in. My weapons are not flimsy, and they are not timid. But rather they are strong, brash, and mighty in God for pulling down the devils domain. Prayer is no longer my last resort, but my first weapon of choice. Submission to God is my gameplan. Discipline is my tactic. And the full blown assault will originate not from my striving, but from the God residing within me. Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world.

Sure, the devil had a comeback for every sentence I uttered… doubt, guilt, distraction, bitterness, lies, lies, lies. But I did not entertain him. His words fell short of the sacred space where the war was raging, and where the ultimate victory was sure.

The devil is an ignorant fool, refusing to admit that he's defeated, while I know who I am as a son of God, and I am armed with intercession and worship. I am dangerous. Faith is becoming sight. My identity is sure, and my purpose is being revealed.

Even though I do not know what tomorrow will bring, I will fall asleep and wake up with praise on my lips.

Check out Renovatus' "Cosmic Conflict - Submission is Warfare" podcast here: http://www.renovatuscommunity.com/pages/page.asp?page_id=125489&programId=83694 

James 4:7 Psalm 18

Whenever I'm traveling and enter a new state, I try to remember to ask the Father what He is already doing in that state, and I look for ways to join in. Even if it's just by Him giving me a heart for that city/state and praying His will over that city/state.

Tonights worship service erupted. I started my set having no agenda, just knowing what my first song would be, and asking that the Father would reveal His heart.

There were tears, shouts, prayers, rejoicing, and youth sobbing at the altar. Father I'm amazed by You.

tonights set: