HOW DO I MAKE MONEY IN HARD TIMES LIKE NOW?

                                                                                       

                                       

A highly respected friend asked me this question this week, and I suspect many of us are quietly asking it too.

It is a fair question, and a timely one. So let us sit with it honestly.

Hard times do not eliminate money. They change where it flows. People become more cautious, but they do not stop spending. They simply become far more selective about what they will pay for.

So alongside how do I make money, it helps to also ask what problem can I solve. Income is usually the consequence of value delivered, not the goal chased directly.

Look closely at the difficulty around you. Inflation, uncertainty, inefficiency, business pressure, changing habits. Every one of these creates friction. And friction, for the person paying attention, creates opportunity.

In hard times, usefulness outweighs appearance. People postpone luxuries. They do not postpone anything that saves them money, makes them money, reduces risk, or makes a hard problem easier to carry. If you want a practical starting point, ask yourself honestly which of these four your skill or offer touches. That single question can sharpen almost any idea.

You may already hold the skill that someone urgently needs. Before searching for an entirely new venture, look again at what you already know how to do well. Write down three things people already come to you for, even informally. One of them is likely closer to income than you have given it credit for.

Do not wait for one big breakthrough. Several modest income streams, built with integrity, can carry you further than one dramatic idea that never arrives. Consulting, a service, a product, teaching, a small offer here and there. Resilience is often built quietly, stream by stream, not through a single dramatic leap.

Busyness is not the same as productivity. Hard times tempt us to chase every opportunity that appears. Before you say yes to the next one, ask a simple question. What does this actually cost me in effort and risk, and what does it realistically return? That one habit alone will save you from a great deal of wasted motion.

Cash flow deserves as much attention as income. A person can look profitable on paper and still struggle, simply because money is not arriving when it is needed. Know what is owed to you, know what you owe, and check the gap between them regularly. Managing that gap is as much a skill as earning itself.

Guard yourself against desperation. Hard times make people vulnerable to shortcuts, excessive borrowing, and schemes that promise too much too quickly. Whatever pressure you feel, do not let it dismantle the financial foundation you have spent years building. Slower and steady still outlasts fast and fragile.

Relationships still matter more than transactions. Trust, reputation, and the people who vouch for you quietly become some of the most valuable assets you carry in a difficult market. Nurture them even when there is nothing immediate to gain from them.

And learn to speak about what you offer. A good skill or a good product held in silence helps no one. Value that is never communicated remains value that is never realised. You do not need to be loud. You only need to be clear and consistent about what you do and who it helps.

But something needs saying clearly here, because money pressure has a way of making us feel powerless, as though our worth is now measured only by what we can no longer give.

That is not true.

There is a form of giving that has nothing to do with money or goods. It is giving of yourself. Your presence, your attentiveness, your respect for another person, freely offered. Abd-ru-shin writes that in this giving of yourself, in the consideration and respect you voluntarily extend to your neighbour, lies the love of which Jesus spoke, and lies also the help that enables another person to rise, drawing strength from what you gave.

If money were the only currency of usefulness, then anyone without it would have nothing left to offer. That was never the design. You remain useful even at the point of your own lack.

One caution belongs alongside all of this. A low level desire just to make money at all costs can slowly open the door to shortcuts that compromise who you are. Guard your character as closely as you guard your income.

When times are hard, do not merely look for where the money is. Look for where the problems are. Money tends to follow those who can solve problems!

And should we ever be hard pressed, even at the point of our greatest need, let us remember that when the need is greatest, the Almighty's help is nearest to us.

And even when money is slow to come, remain someone whose presence, kindness and contribution continue to bring value to the lives of those around you.

WHEN LIFE DOESN’T GO AS PLANNED

 

Sometimes what you call a failed plan is simply a different route to a life you could not yet see.

We all make plans. We plan our careers, businesses, marriages, finances, families and futures. Yet life has a way of disrupting even our most carefully constructed plans.

A business fails. A relationship ends. A long-awaited opportunity disappears. Money becomes tight. A career takes an unexpected turn. A child chooses a path we never imagined. And suddenly, we wonder: What happened to the life I planned?

But perhaps we need to look at life differently.

A changed plan is not necessarily a ruined life. Sometimes, it is simply an invitation to discover something we could not see from where we stood.

The wisdom embedded in the laws of Creation does not always give us what we want when we want it. Yet, if we are willing to learn, our experiences can serve something deeper: our spiritual growth and maturity.

Perhaps that difficult season is teaching you patience.

Perhaps the disappointment is preparing you for greater responsibility.

Perhaps the closed door is forcing you to discover abilities you never knew you possessed.

Perhaps the person who walked away is teaching you that your happiness cannot depend entirely on another human being.

Perhaps financial difficulty is teaching you discipline, contentment and the difference between what you want and what you truly need.

This does not mean we should become passive or stop pursuing our goals. We should plan, work hard, seek opportunities and take responsibility for our lives. But we should also recognise that we do not see the whole picture.

Sometimes, we become so attached to our plans that we mistake our preferred outcome for the only possible good outcome.

There is wisdom in knowing when to persevere and wisdom in knowing when to accept that a particular path has ended.

The real tragedy is not that life sometimes changes our plans. The tragedy is allowing disappointment to make us bitter, fearful or spiritually stagnant.

When things do not go as planned, ask a better question:

“What is this experience trying to teach me?”

That question can transform disappointment into wisdom.

Life is not merely about acquiring wealth, achieving status, finding comfort or having everything happen according to our wishes. There is a deeper purpose to our existence: to develop as human beings, to grow in wisdom, character and spiritual maturity.

So, if your life is not currently looking the way you imagined, do not conclude that everything has gone wrong.

Perhaps you are simply being led along a road you did not know existed.

Walk it with courage. Learn what it has come to teach you. Keep doing your part. And trust that even when your plans change, life can still be leading you somewhere which is of real benefit to you.

May you have the wisdom to recognise the lesson in every unexpected turn, the strength to embrace what you cannot change, and the courage to keep moving towards the person you are meant to become. And as always, I wish you well. 

YOU ARE NOT BEHIND. YOU ARE JUST TIRED.

      

Maybe you are not failing at life. Maybe you are simply tired from carrying too much for too long.

We live in a season that confuses exhaustion with failure. The moment we slow down, we panic. We assume something is wrong with our drive, our discipline, our faith. So we reach for another strategy. Another plan. Another version of hustle dressed up as purpose.

But sometimes the problem was never the plan. Sometimes the problem is that you have been running on empty and calling it commitment.

Tiredness has a way of disguising itself as failure. It whispers that you are behind, that everyone else is moving faster, building more, becoming more. It rarely announces itself honestly. It hides behind self doubt and shows up wearing the mask of inadequacy.

But look closer. Most of what feels like falling behind is actually depletion. You have been giving from a place that was never refilled. Showing up for everyone else's demands while your own reserves quietly ran dry. Carrying responsibilities that were never yours alone to carry, and calling the weight normal because you have carried it for so long.

There is no strategy that fixes exhaustion. No new goal cures depletion. You cannot outwork a body and spirit that are asking, simply, to rest.

This is not a call to abandon effort. It is a call to tell the truth about what you have already given. You have shown up on days when no one clapped. You have kept going when the results were invisible. You have carried people, projects, and prayers that others will never know the weight of.

That is not falling behind. That is endurance. And endurance deserves rest, not shame.

Rest is not the opposite of purpose. It is what makes purpose sustainable. Even the ground needs a season lying fallow before it can yield again. You are not exempt from that rhythm simply because you are human and ambitious.

So before you reach for another plan this week, ask a quieter question first. Not what should I do next, but what do I need to recover.

Maybe the breakthrough you are searching for is not ahead of you. Maybe it is behind you, in the rest you kept postponing because you thought stopping meant losing ground.

You have not lost ground. You have simply been carrying more than anyone could see.

Let us learn to set some of it down. Not because we have stopped believing in the vision, but because we finally believe we do not have to be depleted to be faithful.

May we find the courage to rest without guilt, and the grace to know that slowing down is not the end of our becoming.

THE WEIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE

There is a moment most of us have experienced but rarely examined honestly. Someone snaps at us, disappoints us, goes silent when we expected warmth, or behaves in a way that feels inconsiderate or even unkind. And within seconds, often without realising it, we have already formed a verdict. We have decided what kind of person they are.

We are remarkably quick to interpret behaviour. We are remarkably poor at understanding the burdens behind it.

Think of the irritable spouse who bites your head off over something trivial. The impatient colleague who seems impossible to please. The silent friend who has stopped returning messages. The difficult boss whose moods nobody can predict. The struggling child who has become withdrawn and difficult. The elderly parent who seems ungrateful for everything done for them. The customer service officer who speaks to you with an edge that feels personal.

In each of these encounters, our first instinct is to react to what we see. Rarely do we pause long enough to ask what we cannot see.

What we cannot see is the weight.

The irritable spouse may have received news that morning that they have not yet found the words to share. The impatient colleague may be managing a crisis at home while pretending at work that everything is fine. The silent friend may be drowning in something too heavy to speak aloud and too private to explain. The difficult boss may be carrying pressures from above that they are not permitted to pass down. The struggling child may be navigating something in their inner world that they do not yet have the language to name. The elderly parent may be quietly terrified of becoming a burden while desperately needing connection.

None of this excuses poor behaviour. Compassion is not the same as permission. We do not have to absorb cruelty or accept mistreatment simply because the other person is suffering. That is an important distinction and a mature one. We are allowed to hold boundaries and still hold compassion simultaneously.

But what compassion does require of us is the willingness to pause before we conclude. To remember that behaviour is almost always the visible symptom of an invisible struggle. That the person who is hardest to be around is often the person carrying the heaviest load and doing it in the least graceful way because grace requires reserves they may not currently have.

There is a practice worth cultivating. Before you judge, ask silently: what might this person be carrying that I cannot see? You may never know the answer. But the question itself changes something in you. It softens the verdict. It creates a small space where understanding can grow where contempt would otherwise have taken root.

Every day we move through the world brushing against people who are quietly managing things we know nothing about. Some carry grief so fresh it has not yet found a shape. Some carry disappointment that has curdled slowly over years into a hardness they did not choose. Some carry loneliness behind confident smiles and full diaries. Some carry fear behind assertive voices and decisive actions.

We may never know their stories. But we can always make one quiet choice: not to become another burden they have to carry.

The world does not merely need kinder people. It needs people who remember that behind every difficult behaviour is a human being trying to cope with something.

That pause costs nothing. But for the person on the receiving end of it, it can mean everything.

THE CAR THAT TESTED A MARRIAGE

 

A couple once ended their marriage two weeks after an elaborate wedding. Before the wedding, the wife had built a solid career, earning well and standing on her own. She resigned and relocated to be with her husband, a professional in his own right. Within days of the ceremony, her former employer sent a parting gift, an expensive vehicle, far beyond what a routine farewell usually warrants. Her husband, uncomfortable with a gift of that size arriving from another man so soon after the wedding, asked that it be returned. She refused, pointing out that colleagues before her had received similar gestures, and that she saw no reason she should have to give it up. Neither would yield. Family and clergy intervened. The marriage ended anyway.

On the surface, this looks like a disagreement about a car. It was never really about the car. A gift of that size, arriving that quickly, was never going to be received as a neutral object. The husband's discomfort was not about the vehicle's value. It was about what accepting it seemed to say, about boundaries and about which relationships now took precedence now that she was married. Nothing suggests he accused her of impropriety. His concern appeared rooted in principle, that an extraordinarily valuable gift from another man had no place in their new home. Whether one agrees with that principle or not, it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as insecurity.

The wife's position also deserves a fair hearing. If the gift was a genuine employment benefit rather than a personal favour, she had every reason to feel she had earned it through her own years of service. There is nothing inherently improper about a legitimate corporate reward, and being asked to surrender something she saw as rightfully hers, on her husband's word alone, raises its own honest question. Was the ultimatum really about the gift, or about who gets to make the final decision in a marriage?

What is striking is how many reasonable options seem to have gone unexplored before either spouse reached for an ultimatum. A formal letter from the company, confirming the vehicle as an official benefit rather than a personal gesture from an individual, would have settled the question of its true nature. Where policy allowed, the vehicle might have been exchanged for its cash value, preserving what she had earned while removing the symbolism her husband could not accept, so long as this was handled openly between them rather than negotiated in secret. Even these measures might not have fully satisfied a man whose objection was about principle rather than uncertainty. That possibility is precisely why this was never really a story about a car. It was a story about values, and about two people who had not yet learned how to hold differing convictions without letting them become a contest to be won.

This is where the story becomes genuinely instructive. Two people married mere weeks were not really negotiating over a vehicle. They were discovering, in the worst possible way, that they had never negotiated the deeper questions before the wedding at all. What does trust look like between us. What happens when one partner's discomfort meets the other's sense of fairness. Who yields, and on what basis, when neither is technically wrong. A wedding ceremony does not answer these questions. A courtship should.

The speed of the collapse is itself the lesson. Two weeks suggests this was never about the vehicle at all. It was the first real pressure the marriage faced, and the foundation beneath it was not yet strong enough to hold. Many marriages carry an unspoken assumption that love, once declared publicly and expensively, will simply absorb whatever comes next. It does not. What holds a marriage together is two people's demonstrated instinct for compromise, tested and proven long before the wedding day, not assumed the morning after it.

If there is a lesson worth carrying from this story, it is not about cars, gifts, or pride. It is about the work that must happen before the vows, not after. Conversations about finances, boundaries, family expectations, personal convictions, and how disagreements get resolved are not romantic topics, but they are essential ones, and love is sustained far better by shared understanding than by shared affection alone.

A wedding announces a marriage. It does not build one. The building happens in the ordinary, unglamorous seasons before anyone sends a gift, and it continues in the harder seasons after, when two sincere people, each acting from conscience, must still find a way to stand on common ground.

HAPPINESS, JOY, AND PEACE: THREE FRUITS OF ONE ROOT

                               

We chase happiness, joy, and peace as though they were three separate prizes, each requiring its own pursuit. They are not separate prizes. They are three distinct fruits, growing from the very same root.

Happiness is a condition of the soul. It is felt within, and it has nothing to do with intellectual calculations. The intellect, at its very best, can achieve a kind of self-satisfaction, but it can never produce happiness. Happiness depends entirely on the condition of the spirit. A spirit that is unburdened and unconstrained within this creation experiences happiness automatically, as a natural consequence rather than something pursued directly. As long as the spirit knows and adheres to the Laws of God, happiness arrives as a reward. This is contentment, spiritual contentment, a deep satisfaction with the present moment and its full experience. It has nothing to do with earthly position or wealth. Many wealthy people are not happy, and many poor people are perfectly content. Alongside this contentment comes a quiet sense of being protected, a calm confidence in the Omniscience and Omnipotence of God.

If happiness is a condition rather than an achievement, the question becomes practical. How does one attain it? One of the great principles found in the Grail Message offers a remarkably simple answer: "Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure, by so doing you will bring peace and be happy." Notice what this principle does. It does not point to circumstance, achievement, or external acquisition. It points inward, to the hearth of one's thoughts, the place where thinking originates and from which it radiates outward into words and action. Keep that hearth pure, and peace follows. Keep it pure, and happiness follows too. Here we already begin to see the root at work. One source, purity of thought, giving rise to two distinct fruits at once.

And what of joy? Joy finds its source in the same root. The Grail Message states it plainly: "Dignity, peace, light and joy can in turn arise only from a dignified way of thinking, never otherwise." Joy is not manufactured through external means. It cannot be purchased, achieved through status, or secured through circumstance. It arises, and can only arise, from a dignified way of thinking. Dignity of thought produces dignity of being, and from that dignity, peace, light, and joy emerge. 

What becomes clear from these reflections is that happiness is the contentment of a spirit unburdened and aligned with the Laws of God. Peace is the calm that settles when the hearth of one's thoughts is pure. Joy is the light that arises from a dignified way of thinking. Each is its own fruit, with its own particular character. Yet all three share the same root: the quality, purity, and dignity of our thinking.

The invitation, then, is not to pursue happiness, joy, or peace directly, as though each required its own separate effort. It is to attend to the root, the quality of our thoughts, for from that single root, these distinct fruits naturally and inevitably grow.

THE BIBLE NEVER BLESSED WHAT IT MERELY RECORDED

Few subjects generate as much confused theology as polygamy. Scroll through enough sermons and social media posts and you will find confident claims that the Bible approves of multiple wives, usually backed by the names of Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon. The argument sounds convincing on the surface. These men were said to have found favour with the Lord. These men had multiple wives. Therefore multiple wives must be acceptable to the Lord. The logic feels airtight until you actually open the Scriptures and read what happened in those homes.

The first mistake in this argument is a failure to distinguish between what the Bible records and what the Bible recommends. Scripture is an honest book. It tells us about Noah's drunkenness, David's adultery, Peter's denial and Solomon's idolatry, not because these things were right, but because the Bible refuses to sanitise the people it writes about. A biography that reports a man's failures is not endorsing those failures. It is simply telling the truth about him. The presence of polygamy in the biblical narrative belongs to this same category. It is reported. It is rarely, if ever, recommended.

Start from the beginning, where the standard was set before the Fall, and before the emergence of kings. Genesis 2:24 says, «"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."» One man. One wife. One flesh. Not one man dividing himself among many. This is the original architecture of marriage, and it appears in the text long before Abraham was ever called out of Ur.

It is worth noting who introduces polygamy into the biblical story. It is not a patriarch blessed by the Lord. It is Lamech, a descendant of Cain, in Genesis 4:19, a man remembered chiefly for boasting of vengeance. Scripture does not present his household as something to imitate. It is the first crack in the creation ideal.

Consider what actually happened inside the homes of the men so often cited in defence of polygamy. Abraham's decision to take Hagar alongside Sarah produced Ishmael, and it also produced deep and lasting resentment between the two women, resentment sharp enough that Hagar and her son were eventually sent away. Jacob's marriages to Leah and Rachel, and later to their maidservants, produced a household so thick with rivalry, favouritism and resentment that his own sons sold one of their brothers into slavery. Elkanah's two wives, Hannah and Peninnah, lived in a home marked by provocation and grief until the Lord opened Hannah's womb. In nearly every case, multiple wives produced multiplied sorrow, not multiplied blessing. The Bible does not hide these consequences. It puts them on display.

Then there is Solomon, whose seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines are so often paraded as proof of divine approval. Some who defend polygamy argue that his real error was marrying foreign women, not the sheer number of wives itself. That argument has some support in the text, since 1 Kings 11:1-2 does single out the foreign nations the Lord had forbidden Israel to intermarry with. But it does not tell the whole story. Long before Solomon became king, the Lord had already given a specific command concerning Israel's future kings. Deuteronomy 17:17 states, «"Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away..."» Notice the command begins by forbidding the multiplying of wives, and only then names the danger that multiplying wives brings, a heart turned away from the Lord. Solomon did enjoy the Lord's favour in the early years of his reign, most notably when he humbly asked for wisdom. But his later life tells a different story. His many wives turned his heart after other gods, and 1 Kings 11 concludes with the sobering verdict that Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord. He was not caught by surprise. He violated a command given centuries before he was born, and the account of his fall reads almost like the fulfilment of that warning. As judgment, the Lord declared that the kingdom would be torn away, a sentence that fell not on Solomon himself but on his son, when the ten tribes broke away soon after his death.

When we arrive at the New Testament, the confusion is settled by the highest possible authority. In Matthew 19:4-6, when questioned about marriage, our Lord Jesus Christ did not point to Abraham, Jacob or Solomon. He reportedly reached further back, to Genesis, and reaffirmed that a man and his wife become one flesh. He treated the creation ideal, not the patriarchal exceptions, as the standard. Paul later echoes this understanding in his instructions for church leadership, describing the qualified elder as the husband of one wife, a phrase that reflects the New Testament's settled expectation of marriage.

The honest conclusion is this. The Bible records polygamy as part of human history, often among people the Lord was still working with and still using despite their failures. But recording is not endorsing. From Genesis to the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, the consistent voice of Scripture points toward one man and one woman joined as one flesh. Where that pattern was abandoned, the biblical record shows not blessing, but conflict, rivalry and, in Solomon's case, spiritual ruin.

The lesson for anyone building a home today is not found in imitating flawed men, but in returning to the design set before any of them were born.