In case you need to get caught up before you start Chapter 7, follow these links: The Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 chapter seven enemies of missional giving “Do not covet…anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Exodus 20:17 (HCSB) “I’ve worked hard and I’ve become rich and friendless and mean. In America, that’s about as far as you can go.” Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau) Hello Dolly! The person who puts his or her trust in things is as great a fool as the person who denies the existence of God altogether. Periodically when I was a kid, my family would visit my Granny and Paw Paw in Clanton, Alabama. They lived in a wooden house, well-shaded by several enormous oak and pecan trees across the yard and near an old barn and smoke house where Granny stored her jellies, preserves, and canned vegetables. The front yard had a slight slope toward a hill that angled further down to the dirt driveway that led from Enterprise Road up to their house. It was there that my cousins and I played King of the Hill. King of the Hill is typically a boy’s game—a rough-and-tumble human version of young bucks butting antlers or mountain goats clashing horns. The objective was to remove the cousin or cousins standing at the top of the grade by whatever means necessary and send them sprawling to a place topographically less prominent. Sometimes the dethroning was the result of a one-on-one engagement—hand-to-hand combat, if you will; sometimes it was the mutual effort of a hastily made alliance. Such an alliance was never formalized; rather, it amounted to two people grabbing each arm of the current king and dragging him down. The alliance then was immediately broken as the usurpers turned on each other for final control. For a brief and shining moment, one boy could flex his scarecrow-thin arms at the rest and declare himself, “King of the hill!” That reign would last until the fallen gathered themselves, raced back up the incline, laid hands on the grassy monarch and pitched him unceremoniously forward to less lordly surroundings. All in all it reminds me of Washington, D.C. Or Wall Street.