i’ve got a sizable list of nicknames i’ve been called throughout the years that i’ve been alive, and on the race, i got a few more:
moneybags. team accountant. mr. monopoly. sugar mama. treasurer. scrooge. mom.
those are just some of the terms of endearment one might here as the finance person on a world race team. i served as the “cfo” for dunamis and have been doing likewise for good ol’ lunchbox. of all the things i imagined about my world race experience, grieving my recently defunct calculator, and pulling out massive amounts of money out of an atm at a train station in ukraine to buy forty tickets (to kiev and to bucharest, romania) were not included.
i’m sitting in our missionaries’ apartment, just finished entering some numbers into Excel, and thinking back to when neil looked at me at one of dunamis’s first team meetings and said, “we need a finance person.” i kinda saw it coming but was taken aback still. as i wrote months earlier, i hardly knew how to do addition on Excel and for the most part, defied the stereotype of Asian-American = excellence in math.
over the past couple months, my grip on the handling the team ka-ching, ka-ching got stronger and i developed a nice system of tracking the cashflow. i thought, “i think i finally got this.”
but the world race seems to be in a constant beta stage, which includes how we steward finances. so, i got kinda flustered earlier this month with the fluctuating policies/approaches, which messed with the routine i devised. this month i felt off-kilter handling monies.
it got tired, finally.
then i realized, a month past the halfway point, that this is just one way i’ve reached the point of exhaustion. i’ve run out of myself – no more know-how and strength of my own. no more “i can handle this.” this is where God wants me to be: the place where God does what only He can do. the reality of “He must increase, i must decrease” (john 3:30) has sunk in.
and that’s why i am out here. so just keep calling me sugar mama.
