Witnessing In America Requires Wealth
My parents' penny-pinching revealed why Christians must dominate the marketplace
Date: October 25, 2025
I'm on fire to make money as a Christian. Not despite my faith—because of it.
A week into visiting my parents, watching them water down dish soap for the second time this trip, something crystallized. They drive ten extra minutes to save thirty cents on gas. They shop almost exclusively on Mondays and Wednesdays for a 10% grocery discount. They charge their electric vehicle only after midnight when rates drop. They even signed up for Elon's America PAC to get a $40 voucher.
My parents don't live in poverty. They have meaningful retirement savings. They're frugal because that's their theology—every penny saved is security earned.
I want to talk to them about God, but I know it won't land. Not now. Not while I'm "in between jobs." Not while they think they're doing me a favor hosting me because I don't have a lease in Austin anymore. They know I spend time advising faith institutions for almost no payment. They wish I was at Google or Goldman Sachs like a normal person.
I believe in a God of amazing abundance. But any words I preach about Him will ring hollow when they think I don't have my life together.
My parents are penny-pinching materialists because what else would they be? Without God, life is all about self-reliance and preparing for the worst.
But I see what this does to them. The constant calculation. The perpetual anxiety about having enough. The way they second-guess visiting China—their homeland—because of cost.
Being a good Christian witness to immigrant atheist parents requires one thing: proving that the way of God is the way of abundance.
If people have a problem with that, they need to be more honest with themselves.
This trip has made one thing brutally clear: Christians must dominate the marketplace not for vanity but for testimony. We need to be so materially successful that our joy in giving it away becomes undeniable evidence of something beyond material reality.
When I'm wealthy—and I will be wealthy—my parents will see a different equation. They'll watch me give away more than they've saved in a lifetime and still overflow with provision. They'll see me break every rule of their scarcity theology and thrive.
Only then will they listen when I talk about God—the Source of all my provision.
The child of immigrants in me feels like a disappointment. My parents sacrificed everything to bring us to America after Tiananmen, and here I am, advising churches for pennies instead of maximizing my earning potential at a rocketship startup.
But that same immigrant hunger that drove them across an ocean to build a better life—I have it too. Except my ocean is spiritual, and the better life I'm building includes them, even if they can't see it yet.
I respect their discipline. Watering down soap, hunting discounts, optimizing electricity rates—these are acts of devotion to their god. But I'm going to show them a God who doesn't require such small sacrifices because He's already made the ultimate one.
My dual mission has never been clearer:
- Generate massive wealth through kingdom-aligned ventures
- Use that wealth as evidence of divine abundance
Not wealth for wealth's sake. Wealth as witness.
My parents will never believe in a God who can't even provide for His followers. Why would they trade their penny-pinching security for poverty with prayers?
God's been setting this up perfectly. Every failure, every setback, every moment of material lack has been preparation. He's been teaching me to row while He steers. Daily courage to do what I've never done. Trust that kingdom economics operates on different principles than scarcity economics.
I don't want my parents calculating whether they can afford to visit China when they're seventy-five. I don't want them worrying if their grandchildren will have enough. I want them to experience the liberation of serving a God who multiplies loaves and fishes, who tells us to consider the lilies that neither toil nor spin yet are clothed in glory.
But first, I need to become the evidence. I need to be the Christian who makes them question everything they believe about security, provision, and what's possible when you serve the God who owns everything.
They're going to watch their son build wealth that makes their lifetime of saving look like a rounding error. Then they're going to watch me give it away with joy. And somewhere in that gap between accumulation and distribution, they'll glimpse the Kingdom.
I just know it.
The marketplace needs Christians who aren't apologetic about money but apostolic with it. Who generate wealth like breathing and distribute it like preaching.
That's who I know I will become. Not because I love money, but because I love my parents.
For them... wealth is an amazing witness.
Time to row harder. God's been steering me on a path to bring my parents to Christ all along.