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In God we trust

One of the most respected chains of American department stores is the J.C. Penney Company.

Its origins can be traced to a store started in 1902 by James Cash Penney, the son of a Kentucky Baptist minister, in Kemmerer, Wyoming.1 It was incorporated under its present name in 1913 and by 1929 Penney himself was worth 40 million dollars.

Stockmarket crash

But 1929 was the year of the stock market crash. The store’s stock plunged from 120 points to 13, and Penney himself lost almost his entire fortune. Crushed by this sudden reversal and plagued by unrelenting financial worries, Penney’s health began to suffer. ‘I was so harassed with worries that I couldn’t sleep and developed an extremely painful ailment’, he later admitted. In 1931 he decided to admit himself into the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where one of the resident doctors told him that he was extremely ill.

‘A rigid treatment was prescribed, but nothing helped’, Penney recalled in his memoirs. But the problem was deeper than physical. Penney felt that he had no one to turn to for help and comfort and was rapidly losing any will to live. ‘I got weaker day by day. I was broken nervously and physically, filled with despair, unable to see even a ray of hope. I had nothing to live for. I felt I hadn’t a friend left in the world, that even my family had turned against me.’

Woken up

One particular night Penney awoke with the strange conviction that he would die that very night. ‘Getting out of bed, I wrote farewell letters to my wife and son, saying that I did not expect to live to see the dawn.’ But Penney was wrong. He awoke the following morning, still very much alive. As he was walking down a hallway in the hospital later that morning, he heard singing coming from a little chapel on the premises of the sanatorium. A hymn, ‘God will take care of you’, written by Civilla D. Martin in 1904, was being sung. Penney entered the chapel, sat down, and was transformed as he listened to the following lines of the hymn:

Be not dismayed whate’er betide,
God will take care of you,
Beneath his wings of love abide,
God will take care of you.
God will take care of you,
Through ev’ry day, o’er all the way;
He will take care of you,
God will take care of you.

Then someone read from Matthew 11.28-30: ‘Come unto me, all you that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light’. Penney found himself praying to God, ‘Lord, I can do nothing. Will you take care of me?’

Something happened

‘Suddenly something happened’, he said later. ‘I had a feeling of being lifted out of an immensity of dark space into a spaciousness of warm and brilliant sunlight... God, with his boundless love and matchlessly patient love, was there to help me. God had answered me when I cried out, “Lord, I can do nothing. Will you take care of me?”’ Penney realised that he had not followed Christ’s teaching as his parents had taught him and he had not loved God as he ought to have. Passages like Matthew 16.26 began to powerfully transform his way of thinking: ‘What profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?’ He came to realise that, above all, he needed to ‘learn the anatomy of humility,’ the humility that marked the life of Christ his Saviour.

Having the strength to rebuild his life and business, Penney started afresh in 1932 with money borrowed from his life insurance, and by the early 1950s the company sales surpassed a billion dollars. In the words of Mary Curry, Penney became ‘one of America’s greatest merchants and is a continuing role model for achieving business success.’2

What is critical in the life of Penney is not so much the success of the company subsequent to his conversion to Christianity, but the ability he was given to rebuild his life on trust in God.

In God we trust

How then should we respond to this financial crisis? I would argue that, instead of panic and despair, Christians need to exercise that trust commended on American coinage, ‘In God we trust’. God is sovereign over all of the affairs of men — the good times and the bad — and is working out his purposes in history to bring glory to Jesus Christ. Whatever losses we experience during the bad financial times upon us, we cannot lose God and the spiritual wealth that comes from being a Christian.

In such times as these, it would be so easy and so natural to keep to ourselves what financial resources we have left. While provision needs to be made for our own families,3 times like these call for open hands and generosity on the part of those who call Christ Lord. The words of Augustine’s mentor, the Apostle Paul, are as germane as ever: ‘as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone’.

Finally, who knows how God will use these major financial woes and setbacks. In the past, crises such as the Panic of 1857 and the Depression of the 1930s became a means to convince many — for example, men like J.C. Penney — who had trusted in uncertain riches, of the folly of such trust and to put their faith in Christ instead.

This article is taken from In God We Trust by Michael Haykin, Audubon Press, and is used with permission.

Footnotes
1 For the following details about Penney, I am especially indebted to J.C. Penney, Fifty Years with the Golden Rule (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950) and Robert Flood, ‘Living by the Golden Rule: J.C. Penney.’ In Woodbridge, ed. More Than Conquerors, 340-343. But I have also used Norman Beasley, Main Street Merchant: The Story of the J.C. Penney Company (New York/Toronto: Whittlesey House, 1948); Mary Elizabeth Curry, ‘Penney, J.C.’ In American National Biography, John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17:297-299: Victor M. Parachin, ‘The Hymn That Saved J.C. Penney’ (www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_mam_page/0,1703,A%253D161090%2526M%25 3D50022,OO.html; accessed January 24 2009). His middle name was actually Cash, though there were some who thought he added it later as his business began to prosper!
2 Mary Curry, ‘Penney, J.C.’ In American National Biography, 17:299.
3 1 Timothy 5.8.