April 19

The Bible has some godly counsel that would have spared us overwhelming economic consternation on a world-wide-scale if we’d heeded it. Perhaps one day things will return to normal and life on this planet will evidence prosperity again, but it is true as we forge through the concluding years of the Twenty-first century’s first decade that the wisdom of these words was not appropriated.

In Chapter 13, verse 8 of his letter to the Romans, Paul wrote something we would all do well to apply in our own financial dealings. Here he says, “Stay out of debt and owe no man anything except to love, for in loving is fulfilled all man’s obligation to his fellow man.”

The reality of life in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries was virtually the opposite of Paul’s wise counsel! We found ourselves loving little but borrowing much in order to indulge ourselves, Madison Avenue encouraged us to gratify our every whim and their marketing strategy for the products we wanted told us we deserved to have them now!

Whether bankers were extending loans to unqualified buyers for home mortgages or for new cars to fill our garages or anything else that indulged our fancy, over-extension was the game everyone was playing! With the bitterness of disappointment and loss on our tongues, love was the last word we were prepared to say when everything crumbled around us!