Now that the U.S. President and Congress have agreed to a deal regarding, among other things, individual taxation rates (while failing to resolve even larger issues surrounding America's spending), we can once more ask ourselves, wherever we are, how are we really to view our money?  Sure, we earn our money, and sure we rightly regard as it as our own money and no one else's, but are we really correct in thinking we can see ourselves as wholly autonomous agents in regard to our money?
     Hardly.  We would not be able to earn money if we had not been born on this planet, and we would not have been born on this planet unless it (and of course our parents) existed, and this planet would not exist unless it, somehow, some way, came into existence (whether we believe in creation or evolution as the source of the planet's origin begs the point:  either way, we had no part in birthing it).  We cannot claim, in any way, that we are living and earning money solely because we decided that we could.
     Big picture, our existence and our money are gifts, gifts of a life that we did not contemplate nor create, a life that, regardless of how we think it came about, is nonetheless something that we in no way contributed to it coming into being.  We ought therefore to earn and use our money being acutely aware that we had no part, seminally and ultimately, in enabling the conditions that occasioned it.  We are wanderers on a planet we did not make, sojourners on an earth into which we had no part in determining whether we would come.
     Life is a gift, our money is a gift.  Whether we have a little money or a lot of money, we should note that it is, really, a gift.  We earned it, yes, but we certainly didn't earn the world--nor our innate abilities and capacities--in which we make it.
     So what are we to do?  In a word, give.  It's a hurting world.  After all, what is a gift but something to give away?