Apparent Volatility: Porchside Wisdom, Common Sense, and Money Too!

Maybe It’s Not the World That’s Gone Crazy — It Could Just Be the Money!

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

— Matthew 6:19–21(ESV)

Down In Allendale

Opa met him one hot afternoon down in Allendale, South Carolina, sitting on a wide front porch that had seen its share of summers. The way Opa tells it, the air was heavy, the tea was sweet, and the shade was worth more than a paycheck.

The old man Opa met wasn’t a banker, a professor, or any kind of “financial advisor.” He was just one of those old-timers who had spent a lifetime paying attention — not to headlines or markets, but to how things really worked in the world around him. And what he told Opa that day made more sense to Opa (and me) than most things I’ve heard on TV or read in the newspapers for the past 20 or more years.

This is the story the way Opa told it to me. And Opa said I (Rom Webster) had permission to write it and publish it to share with you folks.

On The Porch

The old man rocked slowly on his porch, coffee cup in hand, and said to Opa and the young man sitting on the porch with them, “You know, folks keep talking like money’s really worth something. But I remember when my neighbor’s family bought a brand-new, brick house back in ’63 for about eighteen thousand dollars.

“I drove by that old house the other day — it’s up near Columbia in a place called Forest Acres. The house is still livable, but roof’s sagging a little now, porch rail’s missing too, and some of the old paint’s peeling — yet they tell me that this house sold recently for nearly a quarter million dollars.”

He paused and chuckled softly. “How can that be? How’s an old house with sixty years of wear and tear on it worth more than ten times what it was worth back when it was brand new?”

He paused, looking out over the pasture where he grew hay every year for just about enough money to pay the taxes on his farmland.

“It ain’t that the house got better — it didn’t. So something else must’ve happened, and it must’ve happened to the dollar. Somehow the dollar must’ve gotten worse for it to take so much more money to buy the old, run down house than it did to buy the brand new one eighty years ago.”

He tapped his mug for emphasis.

“People don’t seem to see that,” he said, looking directly at the young man sitting on the porch with Opa and the old man. “They say everything’s getting more expensive, but I don’t think that’s really true. I think the money’s getting weaker. I think our money might even be sick.

“I didn’t notice while it was happening one year at a time ,” he added. “But boy! When I look back over a whole lifetime, it feels like somehow, we let termites get in the floorboards of our money.”

He rocked some more, looking out over the fields.

“I heard someone say the other day there was a thing called Bitcoin.” The old man paused reflectively. “But then he added that, somehow, the thing called Bitcoin ain’t really a thing at all. It’s real, but you can’t see it or touch it. But they know it’s real because it’s making a lot of people pretty rich all around the world—at least, that’s what the young man told everyone at the barbershop.

“Honestly, I don’t know much about stuff like that, and I ain’t planning to buy none of it neither,” he said. “But that young feller said that Bitcoin was actually real steady; it’s the dollar that’s wobbling!”

And then the old man added, “That young man swore to us that one Bitcoin has been worth one Bitcoin for the last twenty years, and it always will be worth that. It hasn’t changed. It don’t sag like that quarter million dollar roof. And it don’t rot, or rust neither.

“And he really got me to thinking about my neighbor’s old house and that Bitcoin,” the old man added.

It was about that time that the young man sitting on the porch with us reminded the old man that another man in the barbershop had argued that Bitcoin was no good because it was volatile.

“That’s about when it occurred to me that just maybe,” the old man said to his friends on the porch, “that maybe Bitcoin wasn’t guilty of being volatile at all. He wondered outloud if all those dollars that it takes today to buy that old, wore-out house might not be where the volatility actually was. He suggested that our money—our dollars, are sick instead of Bitcoin.

He looked troubled at first. But then, The old man smiled and nodded, half to himself.

“I’ve been wondering ever since if what people call volatility might not actually be stability looking at our sick dollars through a pair of crooked eye glasses.”

Then he chuckled again.

“Anyway, you can forget all that. That’s just gibberish from an old man with too much time on his hands and too little life left to really care,” he said. With that, the old man thanked us for sitting on the front porch with him while he pontificated about the world around us.

Opa’s Reflection

Opa says, he drove away from Allendale that day thinking about what the old man had said.
He surely didn’t talk like a financial expert — but maybe that’s what made him almost believable.
The old man had lived long enough to know that truth doesn’t always show up on a balance sheet, and barbershop prophets sometimes don’t actually know what’s they’re talking about.

Whether it’s faith or money, or just some good old-fashioned honesty, there are some things that keep their value even when the world around us get’s a little crazy and people seem to lose track of where they are. Opa decided that his real treasure was going to be in heaven waiting for him, and while Bitcoin is probably a very good thing (for now), his real focus was going to be on those things that don’t sag or peal or fall off the porch either.

Our Story

That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.

Jesus is alive, and you can trust Him.