Homeschool News & Views
Issue 50, December 23, 2007
From Homeschool Helpers
By Dan L. White
My wonderful wife Margie was in elementary school in
Houston, Texas. That was a number of
years ago. I can’t
tell you how many years ago without getting into trouble. She’s not that wonderful.
Anyway, Margie came home
from grade school one day. Her mother
was working away from home and no one was home but Margie. So she decided she
would take advantage of that opportunity to indulge herself. Like almost all kids, she liked sweets. That included almost all sweets. So she reasoned that
if all sweets were good, if you put them all together at one time, they would
be even better.
She made herself a super
sweet treat, which she thought would be better than anything she had ever
eaten. She began, logically, with
vanilla ice cream. That was the base of
her super sweet treat.
Then, on top of the ice
cream, she poured honey. That probably
looked good, the honey being like an ice cream topping, sliding over the top of
the slick, cold cream.
On top of the honey, on
top of the ice cream, she sprinkled white powered sugar. Surely the white
specks looked appetizing flecked on top of the light brown honey, on top of the
vanilla ice cream.
For her next sweet
ingredient, she added brown sugar. At
this point it becomes difficult to imagine what all of
that looked like, but it must have been something.
Finally, to top her sweet treat which would top all sweet treats, on top of the brown
sugar, which was on top of the powdered sugar, which was on top of the honey,
which was on top of the vanilla ice cream, she poured some raisins.
That was it. She was finished. Ice cream was delicious, honey was wonderful,
powdered sugar was scrumptious, brown sugar was beautiful, and raisins were
delightful – so if she put them all together, that had to be more than
delicious.
She didn’t
know why adults didn’t do that.
Then she took a bite. And she knew.
Margie’s super sweet ice
cream treat is what America is after.
Their thinking is that more is always better.
I read an article about couples who retired early,
early being as young as their thirties.
It seems that most people are so dissatisfied with what they are doing
in their everyday lives that they spend most of their lives looking forward to
retirement. That’s
when they will really enjoy life. A
problem with that thinking is that people have to retire when they are old because
they are too feeble to work any more. So anyone who retires in his thirties catches attention.
Actually, these early
retirees did not stop working. They just
stopped working in the normal manner, going out to a job to earn money to turn
around and spend so someone else could earn money. Instead, they worked at different things. What they did stop doing was spending in the
normal manner.
One couple had eight acres
that they lived on. They grew most of
their own food, which takes a certain amount of vigorous but healthy work. They also worked at finding ways to stretch
the money they had, like buying used things instead of new. Plus they just did
not spend much money on things like eating out or going places. By doing that, they were able to live on $400
per month. That’s
a pretty amazing result. They had no
children, but they were able to live on $200 a month per person, mostly by being extremely disciplined in their spending.
Those couples who retired
early, which wasn’t really retiring but just jumping out of the rat race to
work in a different way, had two main points which they followed.
First, they absolutely
avoided debt, with the only possible exception being a mortgage. The Bible proverb says that the borrower is
servant to the lender, and these people show how true that is. They avoid debt, and they are able to gain
more control of their lives.
Today it is so easy to run
up credit card debt. You’re
in a store, you see something, you slide the plastic, you buy. There is no long evaluation of that purchase,
just an instant decision. See, slide, buy.
Credit card debt is truly
burdensome, because of the high interest rate they charge. In addition to that, credit card companies
are now upping the interest rate on their debtors, even if the debtor never
misses a payment. Congress is
considering passing a law against that practice. When a family is heavily in debt, they have
to work long hours apart from each other.
They are also stressed because of the mental
pressure of the debt, so that when they are together, they are apt to quarrel
from the stress. A common trigger for
divorce is family financial trouble. Piling
up debt is the road to family failure.
The second point of the
early retirees was to substitute reality for vanity. They didn’t care
what somebody else thought about the beat up Chevy in their driveway. They bought things based on their useful
value to them, and not based on what somebody else might think about it. They were glad to buy yard sale items for a
few dollars, if the items were good. Their
vehicles were bought for usefulness instead of sex
appeal.
In bringing this up, I am
not trying to encourage homeschoolers to retire early, but to show that families
don’t have to follow the routine panic lifestyle. Money is time. Every time you spend money, you are spending
a little bit of your life.
Americans
have more than anyone else ever has had.
Yet they are addicted to getting more, making more and spending
more. Like a little kid making an ice
cream-honey-sugar-raisin treat, they think that more is always better. The country is eating itself to death, with
one third of Americans overweight, one third obese, and one third in line at McDonald’s. With
smaller families, they build bigger houses which they
cannot afford. The Christmas shopping
season now starts just four weeks away from Labor Day and the end of summer.
James Dobson
says that he thinks the biggest reason the American family has suffered such
destruction if the American lifestyle.
People are just too busy to be a family.
They’re too busy working to make more money so
they can spend more money.
All of
this earning and spending can make it more difficult for people who don’t want to follow that lifestyle. It drives the prices of everything up. The average new home sells for nearly a
quarter of a million dollars. A new
mini-van can sell for $40,000. That
makes it extremely difficult for young families to get started without
sacrificing their lives and family trying to make enough money just to stay
alive. A major key to doing this is to
accept what the early retirees accepted.
Just get out of the spending mentality.
There’s an odd twist in this spending lifestyle. If someone spends $30,000 on a new vehicle, they take great pride in that. They feel very pleased with themselves and
show their new wheels off to everyone they know. Others compliment them on their new car.
But that self satisfaction is foolish. They just gave all that money, all those
hours of their life to someone else, when a vehicle that cost only $3,000 would
do the same thing – get them back and forth.
Why should someone take pride in that?
A person
should get satisfaction from not spending money.
My dad, who has been passed away for many years now, used to
work on watches. That was back when
watches had things inside of them that actually worked, like gears and springs. He would go to yard sales and buy people’s broken down watches for nearly nothing. He was always saying to me,
“Danny, I bought this watch for a quarter, and all I had to do was put a stem
in it and it took right off.”
In fact,
he used to embarrass me. The yard sale might be asking a dollar for a
watch, and I would think that Dad should just give them a dollar, but, no – he would offer them a quarter.
A person
should not get satisfaction from spending $30,000 on a vehicle. He should get satisfaction from not spending
$30,000 on a vehicle. “Look, I spent
$2,000 on this mini-van, put a fuel pump in it and it
took right off.”
Satan made
this offer to Christ.
Mat 4:8-9 WEB
(8) Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly
high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.
(9) He said to him, "I will give you all of
these things, if you will fall down and worship me."
Satan
makes the same kind of offer to all of us.
He will give us all these things if we give him our lives – if we spend our
lives in the pursuit of wealth, to get more stuff.
This is
one of the great lessons of life. Don’t waste it on stuff.
America is
addicted to consumerism. This year many
more families have lost their homes in foreclosure. The economy is slowing and jobs are being
lost. The average family owes thousands
of dollars in usurious credit card debt.
The country is in a war, and there is a whole
worldwide religion which is dedicated to destroying America. Yet in the face of all that, more people
turned out on Black Friday to jostle, wrestle, compete, spend and get than ever
before.
That is
true addiction, and it is a form of spiritual slavery.
A
Christian family must not be addicted to consumerism.
The
biggest reason Christian parents don’t give their
children a Christian education is financial.
A Christian family must find freedom from this consumerism addiction,
freedom from hundred dollar tennis shoes, from Apple ipods,
from high definition TVs, or whatever the latest thrust is to take your money,
your time and your life. One of the most
important lessons a parent can pass to a child is not to be an economic slave,
trading life for stuff.