Karen Spears Zacharias Author Luncheon 

According to a 2006 Time Magazine study, 61 percent of Americans believe God wants them to prosper. Thirty-one percent said if you give money to God, he will bless you with more money. However author, Karen Spears Zacharias believes Americans have seemingly confused theology with geography. “We think we’re a rich nation because we’ve been faithful to God,” says Zacharias. According to Zacharias, generations are being taught that God wants them to prosper, but what happens to their faith when they don’t get the job they prayed for or the big house on the hill or the plasma TV they’ve been eyeing?

Using her journalistic background, Zacharias scoured the back-roads from Portland, Oregon to Pinehurst, N.C. asking people about two things – God and money. She interviewed the exceedingly wealthy and the extremely poor and a host of people in between. Zacharias wanted to find people ‘who had it right,’ and she found them in unlikely places. Click here to see what she has to say about her journey http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6781223/17624779 .

“These characters challenge the notion that God owes us better than we’ve gotten. They prod us to reconsider our view of God, and his view of us. For some reason, we have this notion that God owes us better than we’ve gotten. Why else would we wait in line for hours, buying books about how to become rich, God’s way? We treat God like a slot machine, yanking on the prayer cable, hoping that the triple 7’s will appear!”

“Proof of God’s love is not found in the square-footage of our homes or the number of cars our garage will hold,” says Zacharias. “God’s love is not evident in our net worth at all. I know without question that God’s love for me or his favor toward me is not manifested in whether I live at the end of a dirt road in a trailer or around the emerald bend in a gated community.”

After her father died in the Vietnam War, Karen Spears Zacharias moved into a single-wide trailer, a 12 x 60, with her mother, ailing grandfather and two siblings. It had plywood walls so thin you could hear a roach grunt. Her family moved that trailer five times in six years. Corner lots in the trailer parks were the most coveted because they usually had the biggest yards. The very rich lived in double-wides.

According to Zacharias, “Almost all of my life’s truly meaningful moments took place in a trailer. I had my first kiss in a trailer. I smoked my first and last cigarette in a trailer. I asked Jesus into my heart on bended knee in a trailer. I fell madly in love (several different times) in a trailer. And I gave birth to my firstborn child on my mama’s bed in a trailer.”

Zacharias is a former editorial writer and columnist for the Fayetteville Observer in Fayetteville, N.C. She is a contributing writer to the Burnside Writers Collective, an online magazine started by author Donald Miller as a home for young, progressive Christian writers and thinkers to share their ideas. Zacharias served as an adjunct professor of journalism at Central Washington University and as an author-in-resident for the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in Fairhope, Alabama. She is the author of Where’s Your Jesus Now? and the nationally-acclaimed After the Flag Has Been Folded. A mesmerizing speaker and a midnight-blogger, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.