Ohio Boy Sells His Toys To Help His Family

In previous posts I have mentioned that my wife and I have been involved with Crown Financial Ministries for a number of years. The lesson in week 3 of this 10-week course deals with debt, which everyone knows is a major issue in today's culture. One of the key verses from week 3 is II Kings 4:1-7 (you should pause a moment to read it). To paraphrase the passage, a guy died leaving his wife and kids in debt. The wife was unable to pay the debt so MasterCard was about to take her kids as slaves until the debt was paid (ok, maybe it wasn't MasterCard...but you get the point). Anyway, she approached Elisha for advice and he asked her what she had that was of value. Since she only had "a little oil" he suggested she gather up some jars and sell the oil. The widow sent her kids out to borrow jars and then she started pouring oil into them. She found that she could pour until every jar they had was full, and "then the oil stopped flowing", an example of God's ability to provide.

One of the things Crown stresses in this lesson is that, like the widow, we should involve our kids in the family's efforts to get out of debt.

This morning CNN had an online story about an 11-year-old Ohio boy that is selling his toys to help ease his family's financial burden. The article paints this as some heroic effort by the son to help the family, and I guess it is. However, I wonder why our culture has reached the point where children sharing in the family’s sacrifices are the exception.

As I have taught Crown over the years I have always been amazed at the things people consider untouchable. They worry about meeting their mortgage, but the cable bill is always paid on time. Their debt keeps mounting, but little Johnny continues to play Select Baseball. For some reason our culture has reached a point where entertaining their children has taken a priority over good common financial sense. After all, in many cases a prime driver in the family's financial problem is the amount of money they spend on entertaining themselves in and out of the home.

Sorry for the rant, but this is one of those things that always leaves me pounding my head on a hard surface. If you would like to read the full CNN article, click on the image above.