Two-seventeen in the morning, a few weeks back, I was wide awake doing retirement math in my head.
Not real math. Anxious math. The kind where you multiply your monthly expenses by the number of years you might live, subtract what you've saved, and let the gap sit there in the dark, getting bigger the longer you stare at it. My wife was asleep. The dog was asleep. I was doing arithmetic with numbers I'd already checked twice that week, hoping a third check in the dark would somehow feel different.
It didn't. It never does.
The Honest Answer
The title of this post says I'm not afraid of running out of money. That's true most days. It was not true at 2:17 that morning. I want to say that plainly, because I think a lot of Christian writing about money skips straight to the peaceful conclusion and never mentions the 2 a.m. part. I don't want to do that to you.
Fear about money, for me, doesn't show up as a rational argument. It shows up as a feeling first, and the numbers just give it something to hold onto. I could have a perfectly adequate retirement account and still lie awake multiplying worst cases. The math was never really the problem.
The Verse That Actually Helps
There's a psalm I've come back to more times this year than any other passage in the Bible, and it's not one I remember hearing in a sermon growing up:
“I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.”
Psalm 37:25
David wrote that as an old man himself, looking back over a genuinely long and difficult life: a life that included running from a king who wanted him dead, losing children, and years as a fugitive with no fixed income at all. He's not a man who never worried about provision. He's a man who lived long enough to look back and testify that it worked out, over and over, in ways he couldn't always see coming while he was in the middle of it.
I find that more comforting at 2 a.m. than any calculator. Not because it promises me a specific number in my account. Because it's a witness statement from someone who actually lived the uncertain years and came out the other side able to say God was faithful through all of it.
What I Do With the Fear When It Shows Up
I've stopped trying to argue myself out of the fear with more research. More research at 2 a.m. just produces more numbers to be afraid of. Instead I've started doing something simpler, and it feels almost too small to write down: I say the verse out loud. Sometimes I get up and make tea and say it again. I remind myself that the anxiety is real, but it isn't new information. It's the same worry wearing a different outfit than it wore last month.
Jesus said something about this that I used to find almost dismissive, and now find genuinely practical:
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Matthew 6:34
He's not telling me tomorrow will be easy. He's telling me tomorrow's problems belong to tomorrow, and borrowing them tonight doesn't prepare me for anything. It just steals sleep from today for a battle I'm not even fighting yet. That's a strangely practical piece of financial advice from a man who never held a retirement account.
Most Days
I titled this post "most days" on purpose. I'm not going to tell you I've arrived at some permanent peace about money and never think about it again. That would be a nicer story than the true one. The fear still visits. It visited at 2:17 a.m. a few weeks ago and it'll probably visit again before this is published.
But most days, I'm not afraid. Most days I remember David's testimony and Jesus's plain instruction, and the gap between what I've saved and what I might need doesn't feel like the whole story anymore. It feels like one line in a much longer account of provision I haven't finished reading yet.
If 2 a.m. math is a familiar visitor for you too, I don't have a formula to make it stop. But I'd invite you to sit with the same two verses I do. They haven't erased the fear. They've just given it somewhere honest to land.
God bless,
Paul