If you have a humanities mind, there is no refunds and exchanges counter where you might get a math-science brain that would do you more financial good.

If you are hopelessly idealistic and believe that you should serve others, you will make a whole lot less money than more pragmatic types.

If you arrive on this planet hard-wired for belief and spend the first two decades of your life in career Christian service, you will be paying for it then and later in ways you cannot imagine at 22.

If you slight your health and joke about not wanting to live a long life, cancer may just bite you in the butt for your 55^th birthday surprise.

If you do not attend to your finances, the fiscal shambles that inevitably results will stun you.

Forgive me. Today I am just angry about the scrabbling life that several friends and I find ourselves living post-sixty. One with a master’s degree and decades of teaching experience in Christian schools finds herself still looking for a job, after getting an associate’s degree in a supposedly more lucrative field. Today she’s applying at local big box stores, because she can’t live on her Social Security check. An acquaintance with a Ph.D. is trying to get a full time job in academe, rather than the part-time one-year contracts she keeps getting handed. Another is trying to get certified to teach in a major city, but finds that her previous training and experience in another state aren’t sufficient. She’s waiting tables and going back to school. None of us owns a home. All of us have spent our lives unmarried and are childless.

This was so not supposed to happen to us. We are educated professionals, and we are people of faith, serious enough about it to attend church regularly. A couple of us have spent decades working in Christian schools and in church jobs, which pay less than the “secular” world, because we were working for Jesus, who cares for His own. It’s also certain that we were paid less than men who held the same jobs—not that we ever asked, of course. The assumption was that we would marry some nice Christian guy we met at the conservative Christian colleges we attended, where we would not meet future movers and shakers, but future pastors and missionaries. Only for us, it didn’t happen. We are the “church leftovers,” as a young man once called us.

Which was okay, because as Saint Paul wrote, “My God shall supply all your needs through his riches in Christ Jesus.” Didn’t get a husband? then clearly you didn’t need one. Sublimate. Teach other people’s children rather than birthing your own. You really couldn’t afford to adopt a child, and back then, single adoptive mothers weren’t common anyway.

I can’t speak for my friends, but I bought the whole party line. I was going to be a missionary, from the time I was in junior high. I took Spanish in high school, not Latin, to begin preparing to save the benighted Roman Catholics in Latin America, who were surely going to hell because they didn’t trust Jesus, but the Pope and Mary. I did a five-week summer mission stint in Bolivia during college, where I was no doubt more trouble than I was worth. Unable to get to a mission field right after college, I began teaching in a Christian school in another state a thousand miles from everything and everyone I knew. There I made so little money that the first seven years of my work life don’t even show up on my Social Security annual review. I bought stuff, got into serious debt. And when I burned out, I went back to my alma mater. I earned a degree in library science by not working for three summers and paying my own tuition, lest I feel obligated to that college, got passed over for a better job, and finally left—to get another degree in religious studies. Which cost me three years of my working life and a boatload of student loan money I will be paying off until my dying day, and which led to no stellar career.

After a short time editing in-house, I got the bright idea to follow my bliss and become a freelance writer, because I’d lost at least enough romanticism to get over feeling that I was prostituting my God-given ability by letting someone pay me for it. Now I grouse because I get only ten cents a word at the best-paying jobs. No one told me that paying my own health insurance and the self-employment tax, which substitutes for an employer’s contribution to Social Security, would grow more and more burdensome and impossible to sustain, or that I would begin draining my 401K because publishing would implode about the same time the economy did, but for different reasons.

And of course, cancer is an unfortunate expense.

I don’t think I would have listened if anyone had tried to explain all this to me. As a friend at church said the other day, I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it. So I have. And really, really, I don’t regret any of my decisions qua decisions, even though my process was utterly flawed. I got to live in another section of the country, made great friends, perhaps even taught a few kids to love literature and know a subject from a predicate and that they needed to agree. (That last may be too optimistic.) I’m sorry I didn’t get brave sooner, didn’t go after bigger things, wanted the protective environment of Christian institutions; I didn’t leave the hothouse, as we called it, until I was almost 47. I love it that I read all the time, even if my checkbook (and my apartment, for that matter) is a mess. I’m blessed to be in church every week, to have my (woman) priest as a friend, to teach Sunday School, to plan my life around major church events like Christmas in July. (We bring socks and underwear for the baby Jesus, in his incarnation as the poor kids in our area who don’t get new things for the new school year. We bake cookies to deliver to local firefighters and police, and for those working in nursing homes.) My inner life is enriched by reading; I like having my head dotted with quotations from the King James and hymn lyrics by the great poets of Christianity—Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, Christina Rossetti, and Cecil Frances Alexander, known to her friends as Fanny. I can still be joyful, even if I can’t pay my bills this month and will be withdrawing money (for the third time this year) to pay for my health insurance. So I don’t regret my choices, just some of their unforeseen complications that resulted.