careening careers

hey guys

Today at Church, we prayed for some people like IV grad Tiffany Lin for their missions in China and one of the things they wanted prayer for was their responsibility in preparing lessons to teach the kids they're reaching about financial management and budgeting, and that was really cool because I met this guy who is going with them from another church and he was sitting right in front of me so I told him about the work I do for my internship working with the financial literacy program of One California Bank, the Oakland non-profit I work for.  Interestingly enough, their church is also in Oakland and now I can help them out by providing them with the some of the same materials and curriculum we use for our program.  It was just really cool to see how well that worked out, for him to be visiting today and for them (the US part of the missions team, as it's an international collaborative mission) was responsible for financial literacy and that he just happened to be sitting right in front of me.

Anyhow, I think I've really grown a lot in how I think I can pursue my career in a way that serves God.  One thing that's been on my mind a lot is something from a testimony Tim Sun shared at summercon about how it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man can enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25).  I think with my interest in economics and business, it seemed like I was being like many other economics majors setting themselves for rich and wealthy careers in what many stereotype as a less than life giving calling of making the rich richer.  However, this summer, my work at a non-profit community development bank has really broadened my horizons in seeing how much good business can be used for.  I'm helping all these people become financially literate so they can empower themselves to move out of poverty and doing a lot of business planning for a new location in the Mission District of San Francisco where we'll provide alternatives to the expensive predatory lending services in the Mission that take advantage of poor, often undocumented immigrants with bad credit living paycheck to paycheck.  I'm hoping to start a nonprofit that uses Stanford CS students to improve or build websites for nonprofits who can't afford professional services.  Tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to help provide financial literacy materials to the man I met in church today so kids in China can hopefully learn more about budgeting and money management.  While I'm not saying wealth is necessarily an inherent evil (after all, the non-profit I work for wouldn't even be in existence if it weren't for the extremely generous vision and donations of a local billionaire hedge-fund manager), it's just been awesome seeing the tangible differences of what can happen when applying my economics skills towards social entrepreneurship and socially responsible business, and I really feel God may be calling me to continue to pursue this type of work somewhere in a business career.  

We've also listened to "Tears of the Saints" by Leeland ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJjg1Joag_0 ) the last two sundays at Church and I've really fallen in love with the song and I feel the message of the song relates a lot to the work I've been doing :)

hope you guys are all doing well :)

-Kevin