The Forgotten Art of Intelligently Buying Stuff.
Sometimes I see things that make me shake my head. They reaffirm what I have believed for quite a while; the world’s priorities are so far out of whack they don’t know which end is up. The other day I saw this headline- “Finally, smaller OLED TVs are coming – and we desperately need them”. This was an article, not an advertisement!
I have counseled many people on finances over the decades. What I have found is that a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a grasp on the idea of a budget. To be sure, there was a time when I was young and I was really bad with handling money but as we mature, that should change.
From my experience, however, it seems that an awful lot of people never learned the basic difference between a want and a need. There is not a single person on the planet who even kinda “needs” a smaller OLED TV, much less “desperately needs” one.
I once spoke to a person about finances who didn’t have enough money to pay all of their bills (we won’t go into why). They paid the internet bill because they couldn’t fathom having it turned off, but they didn’t pay the electricity bill. Do you see the issue there? They didn’t. Seriously, I had to spell it out for them.
In an issue about handling money Jesus once said that we should not let our left hand know what our right hand was doing. But He didn’t intend for people to be blind and ignorant about handling money, He meant that we should keep our generosity private and not brag about it.
In a world so bottom-end-up about a proper mindset toward finances is it any wonder that it has so many other things wrong? The world’s priorities are simply out of order, on most things. As Christians we need to have ours organized by what The One who designed us has put in place. Believe it or not, we can get clear guidance on these from that book which the world thinks is irrelevant, but is a gold mine of knowledge and wisdom, God’s word.