Enslavement

I was asked why I have such a phobia about being enslaved to another. If you owe someone, you become enslaved to the lender. Now I ask who wants to be a slave?
The Scriptures have much to say about borrowing and lending, basically you should avoid both situations, and live within your means. It is called discipline.
It says that money is the root of all evil – not that money is evil – but what people will do to get it and how they use it can be evil. We live in a time were we always ‘want’ material things, and the more we get, the more we want. Now it takes money to get all the excess luxuries so one may have to work overtime, take on two or three jobs to meet their wants. They say they don’t love money but now spend all their free time making it. And the more they make the more they spend and the deeper in debt they go.
Do you see a cycle going on here?
People have not trained themselves to live within their means so they take to borrowing for things they think they desperately need right now. “Oh, it is such a good deal.” But it can turn out to be another project that they don’t have the time anymore to do. And find out they didn’t need it that bad after all, for another great deal just came alone – and well of course they hadn’t paid off the last one so they must borrow the money again to get it.
Were are the righteous priorities? If we are spending, more time at work, that makes work number
1. Material things can become number one
2. Then somewhere along the line has to be family, so let’s call it number
3. For some people. I guess that leaves G-d as number
4. Now I ask you, is that the order it should be? Is not G-d to be number 1, family number 2, and work number 3? Yes, one must work to eat and care for his family, but if it takes away from spending time with the Father and quality time with family – it becomes out of order. Many things we could live without – look at the poor people and countries.
So why do I personally have a phobia about being enslaved to a lender; I learned it from my mother who learned it from her mother. “Stay debt free and owe no one, to say out of slavery.” This was one good moral I had hoped would be pass down from generation to generation. The Scriptures tell us about parents that could not meet their bills and had to sell their children to ‘work’ it off, now they became slaves. What a shame – only in that time it was not for luxuries but just the necessaries of food on the table and clothes on one’s back.
Your name in Scriptures meant a lot, if you had a good reputation you could settle a deal with a handshake. My name is important to me; I have built a reputation that I say what I mean and mean what I say. I do not borrow what I cannot pay back soon. It shows disrespect to a borrower or lender to stretch out a loan. Everyone has their own bill to pay to keep their name from dispute. I have a hard time understanding why other people don’t show the same respect – but what is one’s morals is not necessary another’s.
I work very hard and going without extras to stay free from that bondage. I must say as you get older your wants decrease, and calculation sets in, is it worth it or not. I wish to go out of this world debt free, leaving my children with fewer burdens; the meeting of my bills is not to be one of them. Who knows when your number is up? I almost died last summer – so there is no guaranty on how much time you have left. G-d says “get your house in order!”

Sometimes people borrow to their offspring to ‘help them out’, for they may have bad credit or no credit at all. If you use your name to get it, it becomes your bill, and if they don’t pay, it off it can damage your name not theirs.
Borrowing or using one’s name is not always a good thing, the heart is in the right place, but teaching them the principle of living is not. Everyone must learn to sink or swim, life teaches you many lessons, and some can be heartbreaking but necessary to learn to become all you were meant to be.
It is called chooses – if you made a bad choose get yourself out and learn from it to make better ones in the future. Helping them once may be necessary, but I see many parents doing it over and over, time after time for no lesson was learned here, except how to manipulate another to get what you want.
You cannot pass down a principle if you keep bailing your children out of crises they have put themselves into, they cannot learn to make the right chooses and set their priorities in order.
Bottom line:
Whether it is children, friends, banks, or credit cards – a borrower and lender you should not be. The only big loans I can foresee are when buying a house – and even then, one must live in one’s means to be sure to be able to make the house payments. We do not need that big roomy house, or fancy car – all in chooses and priorities.
May we learn from our mistakes and set our priorities in order.
Seasoned Warrior