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CHAPTER 1
Hero to Zero
CHANCES ARE YOU HAVE never heard of me. I am not famous, nor do I have a list of ultra-highflying achievements to show for my 24-year career in finance. My story may not resonate with you at all. I have no authority, and no qualifications whatsoever to write about the topic of biblical stewardship and generosity — apart from one thing: my personal story. My journey over the last 30 odd years was a struggle with money as the result of a childhood financial trauma which left me feeling poor, cheated, angry and exiled.
My name is Roger Lam, and I am a fourth-generation Christian. My grandfather was a co-founder of a church, and he also started a paint company, a well-known household brand in Hong Kong around the 1930s.
In some ways, we were an archetypal churchgoing family. As far back as I could remember, I had always gone to Sunday School with my parents, and I had always assumed that one day when I grew up I would take over the family business. We lived in a rented two-story house with a large garden in Kowloon Tong, a part of Hong Kong with tree-lined streets and relatively low-rise, stately housing: very different from the better-known parts of Hong Kong, with their crowded streets and neon lights. I had gone to the right kindergarten, the right elementary school and the right high school. I had a little talent in some areas, including oral English skills and tennis — and boy, did I know it. The kindest way to describe me at that time was arrogant.
My late paternal grandfather was possibly an overly generous man. Even though my dad was running the business, he was only given 10 per cent of the shares in the company, as the patriarch wished to spread his favors more widely. My granduncle and his sons collectively owned more shares in the company than my father did — which was where the roots of our troubles lay.
Our family nightmare began in 1985 when I was 13 years old. My granduncle and his sons brought in an outsider (a now deceased high-profile mainland Chinese businessman who had moved to Hong Kong) to do a hostile takeover of the family business that my father ran.
Even though I was very young at the time, I knew what was going on. My dad fought valiantly for more than a year, but he narrowly lost out to the other party.
He ended up having to tender his shares at a heavy discount. He had lost the company he had worked so hard to build up, and in his view, there was nothing left for him to do in Hong Kong. So, he decided to move our entire family to Vancouver in Canada.
At the age of 14, I was painfully aware, to the last penny, of how little money my dad had from the sale of shares, and from that point onwards I developed an insecurity about being provided for. I was an exile who felt that my birthright had been taken from me. I was angry.
CHAPTER 2
Fear Leads to the Dark Side
A WELL-MEANING family friend living in Vancouver suggested that my younger sister and I skip a grade because academic standards were perceived to be higher in Hong Kong than Canada. So even though the English language was not an issue for us, I ended up having one more issue to grapple with — I was a year younger than everyone else in my new environment.
It was difficult to focus. I wanted revenge so badly for what members of my own family had done to me. Success is the best revenge, right? Having no special athletic skills or other talents that would provide an easy alternative route to getting the big bucks, I thought the only way to go was to excel in academic results, and that meant going to a really good private school. However, at the back of my mind was a panicked feeling of worry about scarcity. My dad did not have any consistent income stream, and hence my sister and I ended up with no choice but to go to our local public school.
The first Christmas we spent in Vancouver was awful. I absolutely hated it. It was not so much Christmas that I hated per se, but my inability to take part in this festival of materialism in the way I would have liked. In particular, I hated Boxing Day sale in downtown Vancouver. Everything was on a big discount, and there was so much stuff that I had wanted, but the issue, of course, was MONEY! Some people had it. Though we had done all the right things, I was worried that our family did not have enough to keep up with the Joneses.
In my high school years, I ended up studying really hard to get good grades in order to make a name for myself and to break out from my money worries. I also did a lot of tutoring for my peers to earn extra pocket cash.
But teenagers are teenagers. At the time, I had a very challenging relationship with my mother, so I ended up going to a university as far away from Vancouver as possible. I moved to upstate New York, with the goal being to get as good a GPA in my studies as possible. My personality became very combative. In my view, you were either on my side, or you were The Enemy.
CHAPTER 3
The Lost Decade
GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE in 1993, I must have applied for something like 50 jobs, but I was rejected by 49 of them. Curt, unsympathetic people do not make good interviewees.
I think by the time I got to the final round interview in a couple of opportunities, the interviewers all seemed to have figured out that I had extremely low Emotional Quotient, and that I would not fit into their training programs. The only job offer I got was in Chicago, and at the time I had basically no idea what trading was about, and I certainly had no idea what a hedge fund was.
Yet once I got into place, things moved along smoothly enough. Looking back at those early years of work, I can see that the first 10 years of my career in trading, selling and structuring convertible bonds plus equity derivative products were relatively smooth sailing in terms of getting paid and promoted — which was of utmost importance to me at the time. For example, thanks to a merger between a Swiss bank which I had only recently joined and a UK merchant bank in 1994, I was bumped up to Associate Director at the age of 22.
Two years later, when I was lured by a pay package of double what I was earning together with the prospect of learning different aspects of the equity derivatives business, I moved to another Swiss bank, and within a year I was promoted to Director by the age of 25.
As a result of my childhood financial trauma, I took pay and promotion very seriously. Psychologists say that everyone has a love language; mine was money. In 2000, I started expressing my love for my parents by taking care of their mortgage repayments for them.
Up to that point in my life, the Christian faith meant very little to me — it was pure head knowledge. Since moving back to Hong Kong in 1994, I started going to the 6 pm Sunday evening service at Union Church because no matter how late I partied on Saturday, I figured there was little chance I would still be sleeping on Sunday evening; I was a sporadic churchgoer at best.
In early 2002, my parents recommended a new pastor at Community Church Hong Kong, and I became a regular attendee there instead. They had no evening service, so I had to get up on Sunday mornings.
Back then, the church, known as CCHK, met at the glass-walled 75th floor apex of Central Plaza, a new skyscraper in Wanchai (it was most likely one of the tallest churches in the world). Before the keyboardist would start playing the closing song, I would head out to press the elevator button, loathing to meet anyone at church, let alone staying behind after service to mingle and swapping small talk — I was scared that people might figure out what kind of person I really was.
A female member of the church was an ex-colleague from the mid-90s, and every time she saw me she would ask if I would go to her Life Group, one of a number of small cell groups where people from church gathered to study the Bible. I would smile at her politely and decline, but in the back of my head I would be thinking, "Lady, you have no idea what you're asking! There's no way I would go to your Life Group. If people even remotely had an idea what I was really like, I might even get kicked out of this church."
Despite being relatively successful at school and at work, I was unhappy. To quote the wise Jedi Master Yoda from the movie Star Wars: "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."
I led a life that was driven by fear and anger, and I suffered.
CHAPTER 4
Wake-up Call
A PAIR OF life-changing events happened to me in 2003, more or less simultaneously. Had these two incidents not happened together, I would not be the person I am today.
I was working at yet another Swiss bank at the time in the area of corporate equity derivatives structuring, when I was bypassed for promotion to Managing Director. Disappointed, I ended up reporting to a peer based in Singapore.
Second, I was dating a girl very seriously, to the point that I had picked out a diamond engagement ring. Out of the blue, she decided to end our relationship.
If these two events had occurred separately, I may have had the strength to stomach it, but as a one-two punch it made me feel extremely low. That Sunday I went to church, and sure enough the same female ex-colleague from the mid-90s was there and asked me the exact same question: would you like to come to my Life Group? I was feeling miserable and desperate. I was already in the pits — what else did I have to lose? To her surprise, I asked for details of the meet- ing and promised that I would check it out. In hindsight, that was a gentle wake-up call that God used to get me back on track.
I was amazed to find that I soon felt I fit right in with that new cluster of friends. God blessed me with really wonderful Life Group members, hosts and leaders. They were not the judgmental people I had expected, and I started to look forward to attending Life Group to the point where I would adjust my work travel schedule to ensure I was back in town by early evening to attend the sessions.
The members in the Life Group became my extended family, and by getting to know the joys and trials in their lives, I started to realize that church is not a sanctuary of saints, but rather a hospital for sinners. I also learned what it means to "not think less of yourself, but to think of yourself less". There was a shift in my focus to start looking out for others' interests, as opposed to being purely self-serving. The Holy Spirit gradually softened and changed my heart to have God in the center.
So, the change started, bit by bit. I was helping with a Sunday service organized by our Life Group, visiting and handing out care bags to elderly discharged patients of a hospice, going to local hospitals to pray with members of the church suffering from serious illnesses, going to mainland China twice a year to visit orphanages in Beijing and Shijiazhuang, and so on.
Being a creature of comfort, it was very out of character for me to do all these things — my friends can testify to that! Subsequent attend- ance in programs like Alpha, Cleansing Stream and Walk to Emmaus helped immensely in reorienting my life towards serving God and becoming more like Jesus, serving in different ministries within the church.
CHAPTER 5
Baby Steps
THE FIRST TIME I heard a full-length sermon on the topic of tithing was in 2005. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I was not deliberately following biblical teaching in any area at that point in my life. After hearing the sermon, I decided to start by being obedient in the area of money — which was odd, given my hold-on-tight attitude to cash. So why did it affect me? Possibly because (a) pay was relatively good at the time, (b) I was living with my parents, (c) I was still single, and (d) Malachi 3:10 was quoted during the sermon:
"Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it."
You take your 10% to God, and He returns so much blessing that you do not have room to store it. It sounded like a money-back guarantee. It was interesting that I did not recognize at the time that finance was actually my deepest psychological wound. Little did I know that this period would be the beginning of God's healing for me, turning my greatest weakness into my greatest strength.
I started to get serious about following God's teaching on stewardship, and naturally that started with the area of tithing. My pastor at the time suggested starting small, so I had no qualms following his instructions. And small it was: I started off with giving 1% of my base salary via autopay to church. This was back in the days when investment banking was still paying quite handsomely and, as mentioned, I was living with my parents, so I had no mortgage to pay. Handing over 1% was not exactly a challenge. The next month I tweaked the autopay instruction to 2%, and when that also did not move the needle, in the third month I bumped it up to 5%. As you can probably guess, by the fourth month I got to 10%, and I was feeling pretty smug with myself that I was now tithing according to God's instructions.
That year went by and then came bonus season. I thought to myself, "Am I supposed to tithe 10% of that? What about the unvested portion?" Long story short, after considerable thought I decided it just did not make any sense to play accounting games with God — you cannot hide from Him — I started to tithe on the upfront vested cash bonus for financial year 2005 and in the subsequent year the unvested stock awards as well. Truth be told, at the time there was a bit of mud- dled "prosperity gospel" thinking going on in my head. I was hoping God would bless me on the share price, since I had taken a leap of faith in offering Him my first fruits which had not even been delivered into my hands yet!
CHAPTER 6
Beyond Tithing
IF I HAD previously been mistaken about having arrived, by 2007 I became even more convinced that there could be no mistake about that. I was serving on the church's council, co-heading the stewardship ministry at church, and fully tithing EVERYTHING!
I even figured out exactly where I ranked in the anonymous "league table" of church donations through some fancy analytics on the donation data. Just as I was gloating with spiritual pride, God gave me a wake-up call by telling me through different situations that there were some additional teachings of His pertaining to stewardship which I still needed to grasp.
My senior pastor at the time approached me after service one Sunday and mentioned there was a financial situation with a congregation member which he wanted to get my views on. A sibling in Christ, whom I had always felt drawn towards but not known very well, had run into trouble with some loan sharks who had threatened this individual with bodily harm should the loan principal plus interest not be repaid in full within 72 hours (the sum amounted to 2.5 years' worth of this person's estimated wages).
At the time, I confess I did not know the Bible that well, but I vaguely remembered coming across concepts such as those in Galatians 6:2 and 6:10 to "carry each other's burdens" and "to do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers".
Looking straight in the eye of this helpless sibling in Christ invoked feelings of compassion, reminding me of the teaching in 1 John 3:16: "Jesus Christ laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters." Having been blessed with a reasonably substantial amount of savings, I simply could not justify to myself how I could refuse to save this person from the risk of serious bodily harm — collectors of debts for loan sharks in Hong Kong can be frightening, violent people.
After asking a few due diligence questions to make sure that (a) this was the full amount required and (b) this debt was not a result of a gambling or drug habit, I cut this person a cheque on the condition that it was accepted as a zero-interest loan with monthly amortization, initially targeting a repayment period of 60 months. My sibling in Christ agreed to this as reasonable and doable. I did not know at the time that this was actually structured in accordance with Old Testament principles — Exodus 22:25 says: "If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lost and Found"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Roger Lam.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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