It’s sad, but some people find out too late in life that people are more important than money. They spend their whole lives pursuing an inanimate object that can’t live, love, or laugh.
In their passionate pursuit, they ignore and neglect their loved ones. When they grow old, they find themselves wealthy but alone.
None of their kids or grandkids visit them. Their spouses, tired of neglect, have left them.
Don’t get to the end of your life and find yourself all alone. Money is a poor comfort. Here are three reasons people are more important in your life than money:
- You can take people with you to heaven, but your money stays here. People are eternal spirits whom you can lead to Christ and spend eternity with. Money wastes away.
- People will love you, but money cannot. You can’t buy love, and money can’t replace the fulfillment that comes from being loved by people.
- People can comfort you when you’re ill, but money can only buy doctors. Friends can encourage you and laugh and cry with you, and they won’t bill you for it.
Don’t neglect the important relationships in your life for money or you may one day find yourself alone.
Source: Every Teenager’s Little Black Book On Cash
by Blaine Bartel.
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers
Blaine and Lori Bartel didn’t set out to build a place like this. They became it.
Blaine once lived at the top of the ministry world—national TV, a booming youth movement at Church on the Move, and a growing church in Dallas. But while the stage lights were bright, the darkness underneath was darker. A secret 23-year sexual addiction buried everything he valued—his marriage, ministry, finances, reputation, and identity.
Crushed and barely holding on to life, he spent over a year in deep therapy, wrestling with shame and fighting for healing. Then, somewhere on a windswept highway between Kansas City and Tulsa, he heard the voice that lifted him out of the soil:
“I am not going to give you a recovery. I am calling you into resurrection.”
Everything changed.
Blaine found complete freedom and began decoding a Jesus-centered path that leads men out of the grave and into new life. For more than a decade, he’s been guiding other men through that same resurrection.
Lori was walking her own road—rebuilding after 17 years married to a chronic alcoholic, carrying both the wounds and the courage of a woman who refused to stay broken. She was searching for purpose, for peace, for somewhere her heart could breathe again.
Then God crossed their paths.
They met over pasta at Ti Amo (“I love you”—God’s little wink).
A year later, in a simple wedding wrapped in hope, they said yes to each other and to a calling bigger than themselves.
Today—13 years in—they share one mission:
To pull men out of addiction and to rebuild the marriages addiction has shattered.
House of Resurrection is the fruit of the very ground that once tried to bury them—a sacred space for honesty, healing, and brand-new beginnings.
They are joyful parents of four grown kids, proud grandparents of two, and happiest anywhere with lakes, beaches, sunshine, and reminders that darkness never gets to write the final chapter.