Money does not represent to me "power, love, joy"; I'm not a lover of money. HOWEVER, having money would have made my life FAR easier in the past and having it now would make my life far easier now. I remember one time about thirty years ago. A wealthy neighbor was visiting because we had a death in the family. My mother said something like "people think having money is everything". I think she thought she was going to impress the neighbor and that he would agree with her. I will never forget his response. He looked up and simply said "but it sure makes life easier". I have felt that way ever since.
Because of being JWs and not having money, my entire adult life has been very hard. My wife and I have always had to drive cheap, old cars. There is always something wrong with them. At times we have been without transportation. We spend countless hours trying to work on cars ourselves becuase we can't afford repair shop fees. It would be far easier to just take the cars to be repaired or call a mobile mechanic to come out and fix them. We have to repair our own appliances and everything else. We need to rent equipment to do repairs on our house, driveway, etc., but can't becuase we have don't the money and we don't have the time because we both work low-paying jobs and have different schedules so we can't coordinate our days off for jobs that require two people (like renting equipment to do repairs).
We've found out that living "simple" as the org says is actually more complicated; our times are not like the first century. Jesus could live with just the clothes on his back. One, especially being a JW, cannot do that nowadays. For one thing, many localities won't allow it. And being a JW requres one to have more clothes, shoes, books, etc. When we pioneered, we lived in several structures that were very small and tight. There was no room to put anything. We literally sat on bound volumes to eat. It was not simple.
So, again, having money would have made our lives far simpler and easier. It would free us up to retire, but we will never be able to because we swallowed the JW hook and thought the end was imminent and made no plans for retirement.
