Is it any wonder that disagreements over money consistently rank as a top driver of divorce?

Hammering out a budget is hard work. Raising young children is exhausting. Put this hard work and exhaustion together—and add some old wounds, pride, misunderstandings, and our culture’s “if it feels good, do it (and buy it)” approach, and you have an explosive situation!

In the third week of each month, we turn with you to focus on Household Economy, or Level 3 of your Trinity House. And to put it bluntly, without discipline in our family finances, there’s no household economy to speak of.

While we both took our share of economics courses in college, neither of us graduated with an MBA or a love of finances. Candidly, soon after welcoming our firstborn, we slipped into a bleary mindset that put family finances in a less-important, “non-spiritual” bucket. The family Rosary, prayer at meals, instruction in the faith, Mass…sure, we saw how naturally those fit into our family’s spiritual life. And we didn’t find them particularly hard.  

But bills and budgeting? Particularly in the early years of raising our kids, we seemed to be masters of putting it off for tomorrow.

Looking back, we are embarrassed to admit how “secular” we were, given that we had not invited the Lord into our daily disciplines of stewarding the financial resources he had entrusted to us. Sure, over in the living room, we thought we were being “spiritual” in the best way—convening family prayer—but in the home office, we tried to pay the bills by relying on our own strength and limited know-how.   

So many Scripture passages, Church teachings, and pages from the lives of the saints tell a vividly different story—one that places the story of our bills and budgets squarely at the heart of our life in the Lord. In other posts, we’ve looked with you at the joy of giving the Lord our first-fruits as well as the “All That I Have is Yours” recognition of stewardship in daily life.

To this day, family finances do not come naturally to us. But through our struggles, we have arrived at a few practical suggestions that we share here—as if we are “preaching to ourselves”:

1. Invite the Lord to heal your worries, issues, anxiety, or other wounds surrounding money. We each came into our marriage with some ways of viewing money that were not healthy. For years, we tried to fix our spouse’s errors! But with time, each of us invited the Lord to begin the healing in our own hearts, and thank God, our prayers are being answered.

2. Be consistent—and be gentle. If you have a newborn and things are stressful at work, perhaps now is not the time to have an intricate “every dollar is on a mission” command of your family budget. Especially if you struggle with perfectionism or high expectations of yourself, be gentle, knowing that there will be chaotic seasons of life. On the other hand, strive to be consistent in small things such as weekly life meetings with your spouse that include transparent conversations about your budget.

3. Be generous. “The Lord cannot be outdone in generosity,” it has been said. To state the obvious, it all belongs to Him! Our stewardship can and should reflect the gratitude and joy that comes with this knowledge—as we provide for our family and share with those in need.

Bills and budgets understandably drive many couples to the brink of divorce. But amazingly, bills and budgets can be the onramp for a couple’s deeper intimacy with one another and with the Lord.

A “spirituality of family budgeting” may sound like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. But that’s precisely what awaits us as we rest and abide in God on this issue. The God who has loved us from all eternity and who knows the number of hairs on our head is the same God who accompanies us later this evening as we open the mail, pay the bills, and update the family budget.