Namukisa Christine Mary (Mary is her Baptismal name) is one of the senior young women at Extreme high School. She is also one of a number of seniors who look after the younger girls. For children like Mary life was filled with chaos, anger, violence and fear. Her mum, used alcohol and drugs to escape challenges of her own life and Extreme Poverty in her family. Her father was a drug dealer and user, and an extremely violent man. Sadly, Mary’s home life was violent and unpredictable. When Mary came into our care, she was showing signs of severe hunger, neglect, and abuse. She was malnourished and hungry, unwashed and covered in flea bites. She is now in Senior Five and wants to become a Doctor.

The standard online safety answer to my question is, "NO! Never give money to people you meet online whom you haven't met in real life." In fact giving money to people you do know in real life is tricky enough. It can spell the end of a friendship or can damage a family relationship.  And, there many con-artists asking for money online.  Particularly those of us who are older can be quite vulnerable to messages, emails, pop-ups and so on which sound too good to be true but we think, "What if it is true?" Well, we learn quickly enough that anything which sounds too good to be true, isn't true. With luck and checking things out first with others, we hopefully learn these lessons without losing money.  

What about that stranger who sends you a Facebook friend request and showers you with complement and wants to get to know you? Romantic "love" or "limerence" as the brain drug induced feelings are called, is a powerfully blinding force. So many scammers use it. They create a fake profile and take time to try to get someone to grow to love and trust this fake person they are playing. Almost without exception there will be "red flags" or warning signs that something is not quite right. Perhaps, if you are female, they will claim to be a US Colonel on a secret mission somewhere. They may be divorced and have a daughter whom they adore and miss. All this sounds plausible, except, you ask yourself, "Would a senior military officer on a secret mission really be reaching out on Facebook to a stranger?" Good question. The obvious answer is, "No". So why do you brush it aside? Because, by now, you want to believe him. That's how the brain drugs work.  If you are male the whole thing is likely to be in reverse. The scammer will be a fit looking young female military officer who is divorced and has a teenage child.

And then there is the English.  You're messaging, not video calling. And his/her English just doesn't seem good enough for a senior US military officer. Again, you go along with it and just wonder what this is about. So here's the thing. What it is almost certainly about is that he is not a senior US military officer.  He is, perhaps, Nigerian, or Ugandan, or Kenyan or from some other colonised nation. His English is not poor. It is idiomatic.  It is the form of English grammar and spelling that has developed in that particular nation since it was colonised.  So again, when something doesn't match who a person claims to be, it's safest to assume they are not who they claim to be.

Sooner or later this "romantic" relationship will lead to some kind of request for money, often to pay money to a third party to pick up a parcel on behalf of this one you have grown to trust and get them to deliver it to you.  It will never arrive.  If you have gone along with this so far, as soon as there is a request for money, you can be pretty sure it is a scam. Block and report them.    

Is it possible to be sure someone is not a scammer or con-artist. When I first wrote this post I believed it was.  That was before I thought I had built a friendship with one Kayemba Enock, a young man in whom Mr Segawa Ephriam (Founder/Director of Foster Friends Uganda) saw potential and entrusted with fundraising for Extreme High School. What I now know is that Kayemba Enock became very secretive about his fundraising efforts so that Mr Ephraim and the Board thought Kayemba believed Kayemba had not been successful in any of his efforts. Meanwhile he misrepresented his position in the organisation and exagerated the scale and urgency of the young people's needs so that, once I was satisfied the organisation checked out, and believing Kayemba had become a trusted personal friend, I gave money to an account number he supplied through an email from a fake "administrator" at the School. And he was always available to talk to whereas Mr Ephraim, being a very busy man, and having no special reason to engage with me, proved more difficult to connect with.  

It was in a chance conversation I did have with Mr Ephraim that he revealed the School had never received any money from me. Not a cent. Kayemba was confronted, dismissed from his role, and fled to continue his criminal activity using another "charity" as a front. You can Google "Kayemba Enock" to find out just how convincing a criminal can be.

So, no you absolutely CANNOT be sure someone is not a scammer until you have proof. I senior US Constitution Lawyer who has worked in this space and is a personal friend said to me, "We have a saying, 'Trust and Verify' which means we trust in as much as we are able to verify." 

This is what Live in Love is now about, helping you do exactly that. We want to build a community of four groups of people:

• Individuals reaching out for help
  
• Government Registered and Verified NGOs working in their own communities
  
• Businesses willing to give
  
• Individuals like me who (in the words of an old World Vision motto) live simply so others can simply live.    

We are not there yet. Live in Love itself needs to be registered as a Charity which will require time and money I do not have right now. We need to build an income base which will allow Ritah and I to actual give serious time to this vision. Right now we both work our butts off (her as a carer in Aged Care, me as a support worker for people with mental disability) just to make ends meet and support those we can.

However our vision, if you would like to be a part of it, is to build a community which links these four groups in a way which is safe and brings real hope to people in poor communities in the world.  Please reach out to us at [email protected] if you would like to donate some time and skills to help Ritah and me realise this dream.

If you are a business person and would like to help financially so Ritah and I can put some serious hours into building this work that would also be wonderful.    

I could call this blog "the gap". Because the gap between the richest and the poorest, both within nations, and globally, is growing and with it a whole range of social disorders from addiction and domestic violence to organised crime (see R Wilkinson and K Pickett, The Spirit Level-why equality is better for everyone. See also Max Rushbrooke, ed; Inequality-a New Zealand Crisis; and the 2014 study by Inner City Mission Speaking for Ourselves-the truth about what keeps people in poverty by those who live in it).

I'm not an economist. I hear arguments from those who think the current free market/open competition flavour of Capitalism is the solution to all the world's problems and those who believe the opposite, that it is the cause of growing poverty and all the social ills that come with it. The one thing I am convinced of is that those who defend the current capitalist ideas and spout the now well worn belief that "economic growth" of a nation as a whole will "trickle down to the poor" are wrong. What I do not fully understand is the mechanisms by which the opposite seems to happen fairly consistently. Economic growth following the current ideologies seems fairly consistently to increase the gap between the richest and poorest in a nation. Wilkinson and Pickett document one or two nations who have intentionally taken radical steps to close the gap between the richest and poorest and show how this has benefited everyone, including the richest in those nations.  There are obvious reasons why economic growth might only benefit the wealthiest and not those who are poor. We only need to ask who is in control of such measures to create economic growth. Wealth and power go hand in hand just as poverty and powerlessness do.  So measures to create growth are bound to favour those in control of those measures. However I think there are other mechanisms besides the self-interest of those in power. I think many political and business leaders genuinely believe the poor will benefit from their effort to generate growth in a nation. 

What is needed is a recognition that the gap between the richest and poorest in a nation will only be closed by taking intentional steps to ensure that the needs of the poorest are met. In other words, a nation must gradually give to all its citizens some things as a right that comes with being alive. When certain targeted basics are freely given to all, not means tested, simply given, no matter how poor or wealthy, that reduces the suffering of poverty and powerlessness in a nation. Four basics come to mind: safe and healthy shelter/accommodation, a minimum access to nutritious food, free medical care and free education. These things are not new but have been relentlessly undermined in nations which have bought into the current dominant free market idealogies.

The other thing which I believe is needed is bottom up growth by intentionally supporting entrepreneurial initiatives by people who have no employment. When I recently visited Kenya I was struck by the reality that, without a safety net to provide for unemployed people, every "unemployed" person was self-employed, selling fruit and veges, selling clothes, people with cars driving people without them, and so on. In this country so many businesses fail. In Kenya, if your business fails, you starve. It does seem to breed certain survival skills in small businesses that our easier environment does not.

However Kenya is now moving towards western taxation systems which create a barrier to poor people starting small businesses. This, in my view, is destroying one of the greatest strengths of the simplicity of their previous taxation system which operated like local government rates in Aotearoa. That is, every land owner paid land tax (like our rates) directly and every tenant paid land tax indirectly through their rent. So everyone paid taxes. However no one paid income tax, GST or any of the other things which create so much of a headache for small business people here. So in Kenya, back in February 2024 when I visited, anyone could sell anything and every cent (except their Mobile Wallet account fees) was theirs.  In a nation in which the vast majority of professionally qualified young people will not get jobs in the areas in which they have trained it is critical to remove barriers to people starting businesses. 

Hope is about having power to change your situation. Giving hope to people who are poor is about giving them that power.            

In a previous post I spoke of loving our neighbour AS we love ourselves not AFTER we love ourselves. My point was that the second greatest "commandment" in the Jewish Torah as taught by Jesus is not about giving others our leftovers. It is not about satisfying all that we consider as our needs, first, then seeing what we have left to respond to others' needs.  Nor is it about giving enough to "charities" to feel less guilty, to feel we are generous. It really is about setting others life realities beside ours and exposing ourselves to the challenging question, "Is it appropriate for me to spend this money on this "need" when my friends are facing this level of deprivation?

Having said that there is wisdom in taking care of our own needs first, literally first, as the safety instructions on an airline tell us, "If a mask appears in front of you, put your mask on first, and then help others." And to make the point, the "other" in the picture is usually a child, one whom a parent might instinctively help first.  Why take care of your own mask first? Because, if you don't, you will likely die and will be no use to anyone, whereas if you do, both you and your child may survive. 
 
Over the past months I have demonstrated in a negative way the consequences of not "putting on my own mask first."  I have responded to others' needs in a way I felt compelled by love to do and have ended up in such a tight spot financially that I am now no use to anyone. I am having to focus solely on sorting out my own financial mess. 

So I'm learning that part of "putting my own mask on first" is not borrowing from the future. There are always unexpected costs, whether with a car or when travelling, or medical costs, or....one needs to assume things will cost more than anticipated. One approach is to set aside a generous "rainy day" fund which one does not "dip into" for others but only for unexpected costs of one's own. Would I have the self-discipline to leave such a fund alone? When faced with a friend in real crisis? Honestly I don't know.  Where I went badly wrong though, was that I did have some generous amounts set aside for my car and for my trip to Kenya. But when faced with others' needs, I trimmed those budgets down and down and gave away money I later found I needed. 

So perhaps for me a better approach than a "rainy day" fund is to simply budget generously for the future and then, if money budgeted is not required, it may be transferred to the "philanthropy" fund. Somehow, if you are soft hearted like me, you need to create a wall between money for philanthropic giving and money for personal needs.

This doesn't absolve one from treating others needs as just as important as one's own. For me it is as basic as whether I go out for a coffee when a friend in Kenya hasn't even been able to eat cabbage for several weeks, only beans and maize day after day.  I have promised myself that coffee when my friend's situation improves a little. 

I am not suggesting legalism. If your mental health demands a coffee or a visit to your local pub, then that might be "putting your mask on first."  There is a difference, though, between real needs and habitual extravagances we allow to swallow up money which could be relieving the suffering of our friends.        

I haven't written a blog for some time as I have  been in Kenya for the whole of February with no access to internet on my laptop. Being in Kenya was a real eye opener to the issues people face in many so called "developing" nations. Despite doing my best to befriend and respond to the needs of friends in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan there was much they would tell me about their daily realities that I still fed through the lens of my privileged experience living in Aotearoa. Kenya is more prosperous than many African nations yet I had no comprehension of how difficult and costly transport is there. Many people do not own cars but travel in a matatu or minibus which might be designed to carry 14 people but would somehow fit as many as 20 or more people were waiting beside the road. Alternatively one could pay more for a private driver who would likely be one of the many qualified professionals who could find no work fitting their university training so driving becomes their means of survival. And that is the other reality. There is no unemployment benefit yet a great deal of unemployment. So many people are out in the towns selling fruit or clothes or whatever they can to scratch together a living. The wealth pyramid in Kenya reminds me of stories of the Roman Empire in which the vast majority of people were very poor. Then a relatively small number ranged from having secure employment and income through to the obscenely wealthy old families of Rome with the Emperor at the top of pyramid.

Sadly, some of the obscenely wealthy in Kenya are "Christian" ministers who pressure people who are living in poverty to give so they can live in luxury. A favourite Biblical source of support for this seems to be the book of the prophet Malachi who addressed the opposite situation of a wealthy and complacent Jewish community who were neglecting the tithe which paid for the upkeep of the temple and the livelihood of the priesthood. So it was entirely proper to challenge such a community. To apply such a message to justify wealthy clergy and huge money spent on building programmes when a congregation is living in poverty is nothing short of obscene. The "offertory" in Kenyan Churches is a very public affair with people coming forward, placing their gift in the large bag placed on the altar for this purpose and a leader calling out the amount given by each person and everyone clapping. In fact, if the congregation fails to clap, they will be instructed to do so. I'm not quite clear how this is seen as obeying Jesus teaching in Matthew 6:1-4. 

I dream of a day when African Churches will take offerings for the purpose the Early Church did so, so the Deacons can distribute money daily to empower poor people to change their situations.   

I want to address this blog to my friends who live in, so called, "2/3rd world" nations. I want to help you understand how it feels to me to face your needs and ask each day (or at least each time you face another crisis and reach out to me for help) "How do I compare my needs against yours? When will my needs ever win when yours will always be greater, more critical, more about basic survival, whereas my survival is rarely under threat?"

This is why it is easier for me to give to "Save the Children" or "World Vision" or "Child Fund" or any other reputable organisation with its fundraising based in in my world, my relatively privileged, secure, powerful, wealthy world.  Because then I do not need to face you. I do not even need to compare the range of my needs against the range of your needs. I can keep an ocean of invisibility and organisational process between your needs and mine.  I can look at my needs in isolation and decide what feels like a reasonable level of generosity. I can pat myself on the back and feel good about all the organisations I give to. I can go out to a restaurant for dinner, have as many coffees as I can afford, even upgrade my car, or, (if I own my own home) my kitchen. I can keep the scale of my needs and how I satisfy them safely apart from the scale of your needs and how you are, or are not, able to satisfy them.

But I have chosen instead to befriend you. So I have built a bridge across that sea for us to freely get to know each other's joys and sufferings, each other's needs and how we are or are not able to satisfy them. And so this confronts me. It confronts my spending on things that I do not need to survive but which comfort me when sad, distract me when distressed, provide fun and pleasure as a relief from my work, the list is endless.

One way to view this is through the lens of Maslow's hierarchy of human need. The bottom two layers are physiological or survival needs: "I need food, water, clothing, shelter, sleep." When those are met my mind turns to the next layer, safety and security needs: I'm going to part company with Maslow and suggest this layer says, "I need to know my food, water, clothing, shelter, and sleep will be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next week, month, year."  These two are sometimes called basic needs. Once they are met my mind turns to Psychological and social needs. "I need to belong and feel loved and accepted." Once I feel I belong, I need to stand out, to feel esteemed. I need my accomplishments to be recognised." And once all of these needs are met my mind turns to self-fulfilment needs. "I need to achieve my full creative potential.

If Maslow is right, all these are real human needs. The difficulty is that your needs, my friends, are so often at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and you never seem to reach level two. Whereas my most serious threat is to my safety and security needs. I know I will not go hungry today. In fact I know I will probably never go hungry. I may worry about employment and how I will pay the rent or mortgage but that is as serious as it gets for me. And if I have been reasonably successful even these are not on my mind very much. My focus is on belonging and love, esteem and recognition, and personal fulfilment.

Now here's the tricky bit. If my call is to love you as I love myself, and you are stuck at the bottom of this need level, does that mean I need to stay there with you until we both are able to move on?  Or do I get to say my belonging and love needs and my esteem and accomplishment needs, are just as vital to me as your survival needs are to you?" Because, in a world in which vast numbers are trapped at the level of survival needs, if those must always come first, then my needs may never become important enough. They may need to wait forever until your survival needs are met.

I raise this as a question. I do not offer an answer. My question to you, my friends whose survival needs continually confront me is how do you view my needs and yours? I had a holiday planned. It was important to me for reason I will not go into here. Yet faced with your survival needs I gave of my holiday savings to buy some of you food, to pay for surgery for others, and so on. Was I right? I almost made a different decision. I told you I could not help. But then I did help, knowing it could put in jeopardy this trip so important to me. 

This is where the rubber meets the road. Please help me see this as you see it.

I  have been "AWOL" from this blog for a while. My own mental health took a nose dive for a bit at Christmas. And in responding to a number of desperate needs in poor communities I connect with I have found myself in a rather desperate financial situation myself. Except mine is not hunger or a life and death medical emergency, or being trapped at night in a town alone with no money to get home. Mine is a planned trip to Kenya in February. So faced with needs so dire that I simply could not place as "unavailable" money I did not need until I leave on January 30, I gave to save a critically ill teenager and then to others to buy food, and then to another take time of work when she was terribly ill and so it went on, until now I have everything arranged for my trip to Kenya but no money to take with me, no money to pay for the trip itself. 

These kinds of decisions are where the rubber meets the road when, as those who are the beneficiaries of the terrible inequities of power and wealth in the world, we dare to befriend those who are its victims. Should I have made available the money I didn't need until February? Was this decision, or rather a whole series of decisions, wrong? Most of us build a secure wall around the things we consider our needs. What we need to face is that wall protects our privilege and that privilege stands in dire contrast to what others consider their needs. Once we take down that protective wall we can no longer hide behind it. We can no longer measure our "needs" with one ruler and others needs with a different one. We are faced with a call to live what we claim that every human being has the same dignity and worth as another.

When I first wrote this I believed all of these needs which I gave to were genuine.  As I edit this on 9 May 2025 I know that, while most of them turned out to be genuine, one or two right on Christmas were invented by a heartless con-artist who allowed me to put my trip in jeopardy to fill his own pocket. That, more than any other reason, is why we DO in fact need to create some kind of boundary between our needs and those of others or it is simply not safe for those who are wealthy to befriend those who are poor. 

Some years ago (well 48 years ago when aged 19 and a Christian youth worker in Secondary Schools)  I met an inspiring and challenging Guyanan Christian called Morris Stuart. He travelled through the country visiting our Secondary Schools. He was the first black person I had the opportunity to get to know and he really did have an impact. At first sight he really did turn heads and evoke curiosity. He was educated in England and spoke with what might be called an "Oxford Accent." And he was an incredible communicator with a sharp mind.    

Morris related so respectfully and easily with non-Christians that his visit fundamentally changed the inward looking culture of the Christian groups in the schools. .Instead of meeting them behind closed doors in a classroom, he would ask the group to meet him instead out in the playground where he would engage with whoever gathered around with humour, humility, and respect.

One of his passions was the terrible inequity between rich and poor in the world. He would speak about "Voluntary Poverty" by which he meant that, as wealthy Christians who have choice we need to use that choice to go in the opposite direction from our culture, to live more and more simply, and to give away power to those who are powerless, to truly follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

A few years later I met another challenging Christian, a Southern Indian called P T Chandapilla. "Chanda" as he was affectionately called quoted St Paul who wrote these words to the Christians in ancient Corinth: 

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich." (2 Corinthians 8:9)

Paul, a Jewish Pharisee, is doing something quite astonishing. From the beginning Christians have been inclined to "spiritualise" nature and the normal stuff of human life so as to avoid facing up to human realities Here Paul does the opposite. He takes a Christian religious belief about Jesus (that, before he was the man Jesus, he was a divine being who had lived with and was part of the community we call God) and argued that this being "gave away" all that power and privilege to become a "poor" human being so that we could become ":rich" and part of God's family. 

Paul then uses this to shame the wealthy Corinthian Christians into giving sacrificially to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering severe poverty at that time. In part Paul is trying to heal a rift between Jewish and Gentile Christianity.

How might this also heal some ethnic and cultural rifts in our own age? In the words of Pink Floyd in my favourite album "Dark Side of the Moon" "With, without, don't you know that's what the fighting's all about." 

Voluntary poverty is a fundamentally different life pathway which, instead of aiming towards accumulating power and wealth, aims toward shedding both of these things and progressing towards the goal of complete detachment from wealth and power.

Do we do so because these things are evil. No, not at all, it is the attachment to wealth and power that is evil, that perpetuates so much human suffering and destroys human joy. It is an addiction. Addictions grow out of looking for something in the wrong place but finding there just enough of the real thing we yearn for, that we keep looking in the wrong place until we can no longer let it go. Neither wealth nor power are evil in themselves. Evil is that which diminishes or takes away life. Attachment to wealth and power leads us to put the eradication of poverty and hunger into the "too hard basket" when actually the only thing hard about it is relinquishing our addiction to wealth and power so we are free to give it away.    .  

It is so satisfying when we can express our love in practical giving that changes the experience of suffering of people we have grown to love and trust. And it is so difficult to stay present with them and say to one person after another, "I'm so sorry. All I can do is pray.". 

This is a really hard part of loving people who are suffering. Changing their situation when we can is so wonderful. And we are rewarded with such gratitude.  Remaining in communication with them when we are struggling to meet our own needs and cannot do anything to help is not an easy thing to do. Yet befriending people who are suffering without going into "fix it" mode, being present to people in their suffering without giving unsolicited advice, this is where love begins. This is love 101 and it is one of the toughest expressions of love there is. 

With all of my international online friends I began here because I took seriously the online safety principle of never giving money to people you only know online and have not met in real life. It seemed easier then when I could simply state that boundary. and say, "I can pray. I cannot give you money. And I cannot ask others to give you money." Those who respected it I kept corresponding with. Those who did not, I blocked.   Those who remained became dear friends and, over time, one by one, I decided I knew they were not scammers and, when I prayed for their needs I also asked, "is it time I become part of the answer to my own prayers." And a new journey began of (in the words of the World Vision motto some years ago) living simply to help others simply live.

However I simplified my life too much so that there was no room for miscalculation, increased costs, or unexpected medical or car bills. And now, while I have money in my accounts, I am significantly short of money I will need in two months from now. So now I need to return to that first boundary of staying present to dear friends who are suffering at the level of basic survival and health needs, praying for them, maintaining connection with them, and not emptying what is left in my savings account. This is a truly miserable experience.  This is when loving others becomes its own suffering. 

And yet it is nothing to what my friends are suffering. They are suffering at a primal level and I am not.  It is likely I never will.  I am short of money but will not go without food, shelter, or health care. I am short of money in a budget but I am not hungry.  This makes it terribly difficult to say, "No" right now even though I know I must do so.  This is the misery. Frankly, I would rather I was hungry than to not be able to ease the suffering of my friends.

I was talking with a young business person about my humanitarian work and how to promote it successfully. He suggested I needed to understand that everyone who gives to humanitarian projects or organisations does so to feel less guilty.  We feel guilty for the personal power and ease we enjoy, as those who are relatively privileged in the world, when we are confronted with others suffering hunger and so on. He was suggesting that all successful humanitarian fundraising is about cultivating that guilt so people give more to relieve it!  So, according to this analysis, we give enough to be able to continue to enjoy what we enjoy without our pleasure being spoiled by feeling guilty about it. He did not see this as a bad thing to use! He simply wanted to me understand this was the thing I needed to appeal to! He was saying we give to take away a negative, not to increase a positive.

I did not like his analysis. Yet I have to admit there is truth in this when I pay attention to my own motivation for the sacrifices I make. I used to feel this way every time I read one of Jesus damning parables like the one about sheep and goats in Matthew 25:31-46. And then I gave to reduce guilt in precisely the way he described, or to lessen my fear of judgement! I would freely enjoy my privilege while also giving something to most charities that asked for it. It is actually now that I have less and am needing to budget more carefully that my motives are becoming cleaner. I do give out of discomfort with things I enjoy while others are suffering but not so I can continue to enjoy those things. Rather, if those enjoyments no longer feel right while my friends who live in poverty are suffering, I let go of those things. I do not try to live exactly as they live. That is neither possible nor helpful. However I do ask whether I enjoy things because I really need them or just out of habit and a sense of entitlement.  I no longer think of my income as mine to do with as I please. It is there for love. It is there to love others as I love myself.  

 This weekend I sold my sports car, my lovely little late model Mazda MX5 Roaster (manual and soft top of course). I replaced it with a Hybrid that was $12,000 less than I got for the sports car.  This money will, mostly, pay back money I have given to humanitarian work that was set aside as tax savings and for my own future planning. I have "borrowed from the future" to respond to some needs I couldn't respond to without doing so. The money will also pay for a trip to Kenya and some other personal needs.   

Not all those decisions were good decisions. A wise person has said, "Every 'yes' is a 'no'". When we cannot say "no" to human needs that we are faced with, that is a problem. We cannot relieve all human suffering.  Sometimes all we can do is be present with someone in suffering neither they nor we can change, Yet I could change these things by taking from money for my own needs. It was "my" money I thought. I had the personal power to make that decision. And so I did. Yet this was a weakness not a strength, a vice not a virtue.  This was, about my unwillingness to be present to suffering when I had the personal power to take it away. This was not living in love because I did not love myself in these decisions. I said "no" to myself and "yes" to others.

When I put my car on "TradeMe" I cried. I had no idea I loved it so much. It really has brought me a lot of fun and joy, far more than I even thought possible from driving a car. It looked very expensive and that embarrassed me. I don't like to be thought of as "rich". I feel shame associated with wealth. Why? Is this "true" guilt (guilt because I am behaving badly) or "false" guilt? It is surely a good thing for my behaviour to change when I become aware I am living unjustly. However the shame I felt was all about other's opinion. I care far too much about what others think of me.

Yet this little car met a real need. The past three years have been mentally and emotionally tough for me as I have transitioned from "Nicholas Ian Frater" to "Nicola Sian Frater". Coming out publicly as a trans woman was the easy bit. The really tough times were leading up to that decision. However the emotional and mental journey through the hormonal side of a girl's puberty at age 64-66 has also been rough. And it has triggered childhood trauma and taken me to some very dark places I almost did not survive. This is not an easy thing to go through while everyone is expecting you to have the maturity of a 66 year old!

So my little sports car was a comfort through some of the darkest experiences of my life. That, I now realise, was a need. I should not have felt guilty about it. I did, rightly I think, feel discomfort around the harm I was doing to the earth by driving a petrol driven car and enjoying its power and acceleration. We use most fuel when accelerating. Getting to the speed limit in the shortest time possible (and making some noise doing so) was, for me, one of the really fun parts of driving this little car. And I so loved driving it around windy mountain roads. I would hop in and drive it just for the pleasure of doing so. 

It was right, though, to enjoy it for a time and now it is right to let it go, Now that I have sold my dear little car I am very happy with that decision. It feels right that I enjoyed it for a time and right to let it go now and look back on that as a wonderful memory. 

Coming back to the young business person's analysis, I don't want to manipulate money out of wealthy people using guilt. This is not an "ends justifies means" situation for me. I do want to facilitate community with others who really desire to journey deeper into love for those who are poor. I want to connect with those who desire to live in love for self and others in a wholesome and mature way, to grow friendships with people who are poor and powerless, both in their own communities and in in our global community, and to learn the courage to say "no" as well as the courage to say "yes", to learn the strength, at times, to be present to those who are suffering when we cannot change that suffering without saying "no" to one's own real needs.