The Steward and the Open Hand
Part Two — Money and the First of the Outer Three
A FOUR-PART SERIES · PART TWO OF FOUR
Last week, seventeen weeks in the desert and the foundation underneath them: your identity is received, not constructed. This week, we step into the first of the three domains that proving ground clarified for me.
Psychologist Erik Erikson spent decades mapping how human identity develops across the lifespan. He found that the people who navigated the pressures and transitions of adult life most successfully were not the ones who had the most talent or the most resources. They were the ones who had arrived at what he called “identity achievement” — a settled, secure sense of who they are that could withstand the destabilizing forces of failure, loss, transition, and change.
Three Domains of the Outer Life
If earlier reflections explored identity in the domains closest to our inner world — the spiritual, the mental, and the physical — and then in the relational domains of love, family, and work, this one moves to the outer ring: the three domains where our internal identity meets the external world and either holds or fractures under pressure.
Money. Community. Hobbies.
These may sound mundane compared to the high spiritual and psychological language we sometimes use in identity work. But I would argue they are anything but. They are the proving ground where the person you believe yourself to be either shows up — or doesn’t.
1. Money: · The Identity of the Steward
Let me be honest with you: nobody in the desert was thinking about money. We were thinking about feeding people, surviving the heat, and figuring out how to communicate with twelve soldiers who spoke a completely different language. But when I came home from that deployment and re-entered civilian life, money became one of the most disorienting domains I had to navigate — because war has a way of clarifying what actually matters, and the clarity does not always translate smoothly into a culture built largely around the accumulation of things.
Here is the tension. Most of us carry around money without ever naming it: we have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that our value is tied to our financial output. Provider. Earner. Breadwinner. The one who keeps the lights on. These are not bad things — provision is genuinely a form of love, and the person who refuses to take financial responsibility for their household is not someone I will defend. But when provision becomes the primary source of identity, something has gone deeply wrong.
Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
— Hebrews 13:5
Notice that the antidote to the love of money is not the absence of money — it is the presence of God. Contentment is not a financial strategy. It is a theological posture. It is the settled conviction that you are not what you own, not what you earn, and not what you owe. It is the freedom that comes from knowing your security is not denominated in any currency.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow mapped what he called the “hierarchy of needs” — his observation that human beings move from meeting basic survival needs toward higher-order needs for belonging, esteem, and what he called “self-actualization.” His framework is useful, but it is incomplete for the person of faith. Because the person who has received their identity from God does not move up the hierarchy from the bottom. They move through it from the top — anchored in a security that precedes and supersedes every financial condition.
This does not mean money does not matter. It matters enormously — as a tool, as a resource for generosity, as the practical means by which we care for our households and contribute to our communities. What it means is that your relationship with money must be governed by your identity.
The person who knows who they are can hold money with an open hand — grateful when it comes, faithful when it goes, generous in every season. The one who does not know who they are will spend every season either chasing money to feel secure or resenting it because it has not delivered the identity they were hoping it would.
“The person who knows who they are can hold money with an open hand. The one who does not will spend their life being held by it.”
EARLY YEARS: The financial identity work of this stage is establishing the discipline of stewardship before the income is large — because the habits you form when the stakes are low are exactly the habits you will carry into the seasons when they are high.
BUILDING YEARS: The pressure to provide can quietly migrate from a calling into an identity. The question is not whether you are providing. It is whether you could still tell someone who you are if the provision stopped.
PEAK YEARS: Money in this stage should be increasingly in service of mission — legacy giving, mentorship investment, the deliberate deployment of resources toward outcomes that outlast the earner.
LEGACY YEARS: Your relationship with money in this stage becomes almost entirely about transfer — what you leave, to whom, and why. Your estate plan is a theological document, whether you think of it that way or not.
NEXT WEEK · PART THREE
If Money tests whether you can hold a thing without it holding you, the next two domains test whether you can hold each other — and whether you can hold the parts of you that exist for no productive reason at all. Next week: Community and Hobbies. Two domains that look optional and are anything but.
Sit this week with the open hand. Notice in your own life where it is open and where it has quietly closed. See you next week.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Life, Leadership, Legacy & Marriage Coach · 30+ Years of Leadership Experience
Nate Parsons is a life, leadership, legacy, and marriage coach and mentor with over 30 years of leadership experience spanning military, ministry, business, and personal development. He and his wife Noemi are the founders of S3 Leadership Solutions and On-Fire Marriage, dedicated to helping people across every life stage discover and fulfill their God-given purpose.
