Why did a simple conversation about money make a coworker think about Jesus?

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Jack. Why do you budget your money? This is a question that I got from one of my coworkers. For context, I work for a cancer research hospital in the United States. My co-workers and I, most of whom are surgeons, are constantly faced with the answers to our research, sometimes meaning the difference between life or death for our patients.

And so naturally, I thought that conversation or spiritual conversation with my coworkers would revolve around this context. So I was a little surprised when Jesus was prompting me to provide a spiritual answer to a seemingly simple question about budgeting from my coworker. Up to this point, we’ve been discussing the high financial costs of medical training in the United States. When asked why I budget, I sensed an opportunity from God to share how he has changed my life as well as my perspectives, including those on money. So I began my answer about how I started following Jesus as a freshman in college.

My coworker slowly leaned in, an inquisitive look on their face, clearly wondering how I would connect this back to money. I continued, Jesus talks more about money than almost any other topic in the Bible. Previously, I saw money as a resource to get what I wanted. However, whenever I started reading the Bible, money wasn’t described as a resource to be owned or hoarded. Rather, it was a resource given to us by God to be borrowed for his purposes here on this earth.

And so now the reason that I budget is so I can give generously to others, recognizing that I have been a recipient of the generous giving that God has done in my life. Slowly, the conversation switched over and kind of died out. But before the end of the day, my coworker grabbed me and said, “I didn’t realize that Jesus talked about things that really matter in our lives today.” I thought back to myself laughing about how I originally thought a spiritual conversation between my coworkers and I would go. Instead, I knew in this moment that he used this conversation to plant a seed of curiosity about him in my coworker’s mind.

I was also reminded at this point that God can use any person, in any situation, in any conversation as a way to share the gospel to those who desperately need it.