God and Money

Saturday of last weekend my Church had a seminar called "God and Money." It was aimed at young adults - those who are starting to set lifelong habits involving money. The time was divided up into two parts. The first hour was biblical teaching on money by Mike Willbanks, the college / young adult pastor at my Church. I liked a lot of what he said. One thing in particular stuck with me. I'll reproduce it from memory:

Is money good or is money bad? Is it a blessing or a curse? It is both good and bad, but never neutral. It all depends on how you control your money. Think about your life as a train, and money as fire. When properly controlled in the engine, fire provides a powerful driving force for the train. Money can be used to enable great things. On the other hand, consider if that same "good" fire was in the rest of the train - It would be an absolute disaster. Money is like that. If you don't keep your money in check, it will ruin your life.

The second hour was basic financial advice from two professional financial planners that are part of my Church. It wasn't anything particularly new to me, although one thing struck me as kind of scary because of what it says about our culture. They advised people to always use cash or debit for purchases, never credit cards. At first I thought, that's dumb, I use them all the time, and pay them off in full every month - no big deal. Then I thought about the fact that this was coming from professional financial planners. These guys have probably seen how thousands of people handle their money. That most likely means that an incredible majority of people cannot handle credit cards responsibly and get themselves into huge trouble with them, and that's out of people that are responsible enough to go to financial planners in the first place.