The Dangers of Indebtedness

Does having debt and paying it back in a timely manner build your credit score? Sure it does; but it also builds your indebtedness. This is a no-brainer. Having debt may contribute to an impressive credit score; however, it also contributes to insomnia, stress, anxiety and depression.

If you make the decision to purchase on time in order to build your credit score, know this one thing: the creditor is only your friend as long as you are increasing your debt and paying your payments on time. If you fall upon hardship and ask for assistance, the aid offered will be more beneficial to the creditor than to you in the long run. A mortgage company that offers a $200.00 payment diversion for six months and then requires a $2,000.00 balloon payment at the end of that term is hardly looking out for your best interest.

Many Americans are victims of the failed economy and have been forced into unemployment. To this end, they are unable to make the standard minimum payments to their debtors. The heartless and uncaring nature of the people a distressed customer has to deal with is utterly appalling! If your hope is to avoid a delinquent status and prevent your account from going to collections, you may be told there is no help for you. You must be employed and able to make a payment regularly in order to qualify for help. If you do not have an income, which is often the reason you need assistance, you may find yourself in the company of a collections agency or even an attorney, being summoned to court. This holds true even if you have been making regular payments.

Creditors often do not care about the client, just the money that client contributes. It seems in the best interest of a creditor to offer a program where the troubled customer can pay off the principal balance, at least allowing them to recover the original debt acquired by the client. However, rather than helping a customer to stay out of a delinquent status, they often force them into the position of bankruptcy.

Undeniably and quite sorrowfully, the debt belongs to the person who was once hopeful of building an impressive credit score. The once valued customer is now badgered with incessant telephone calls at all hours of the day and night – all for the sake of being able to borrow a higher amount and increase debt at a later date. After two years of paying only a bit more than the minimum payment due with no additional charges, one’s balance on a credit card can and often will be higher.

Something happens to the average citizen when they receive that shiny card in the mail. It is very tempting to buy what you want now without considering whether or not you will really use it later or even want it after the initial infatuation passes.

Whether or not the accounts ever reach a collection status, indebtedness is a form of slavery and often college-aged people are targeted by creditors so that the cycle starts early. What creditors will not tell the customer is that good credit can be built by paying the full balance off every month and simply by paying your utilities and rent on time every month. America is in a crisis right now. Everyone is hurting. Much of this pain is a result of wanting what everyone else has and instead of saving for it, going out and buying it with plastic and not cash.

Homeschooling for a lifetime

So, I still don’t know how twelve years goes by so fast. It seems like yesterday that I ordered my first box of A Beka books and Saxon Math. We were so excited to be teaching our daughter first grade and our son four year Pre-K. Everyone wanted to know how long we were going to do this thing called homeschooling. You know, we’re strange for doing such a thing, right? I mean, really, aren’t we taking our kids’ lives in our own hands? Quite the contrary. We were taking our kids’ lives out of the government’s hands and placing them into God’s hands.

After the first year, things got tougher. Teaching the curriculum wasn’t so bad, but dealing with attitudes and selfishness and budding personalities challenged me as a teacher. I was quite unprepared for having the kids home all day and having to play teacher. That’s the free spirit in me. I’d rather sit around and read or write or talk or watch movies than have to work. So, I have tried very hard throughout the last twelve years to make work as fun as it can be. Life is too short to be a stiff neck.

Of course, as we got into high school in our teaching phase, I realized that many things needed to be stepped up a bit. I have often felt inadequate and like I was leaving something out where it came to the kids and their education. But I’ve had many homeschooling mentors along the way encourage me to continue to teach and guide the kids to follow their hearts while chasing after God’s dream for their lives. 

The reasons I began homeschooling seem to have faded as time has gone on, replaced with newer, more urgent reasons. At first, I wanted to protect my children from the influence of the world. Later, I wanted to make sure they received an education worthy of having. Now, that the first leg of my journey is complete and I am finished teaching my daughter her high school work, I see that there is so much more to teach this budding young woman to prepare her for the future God has in store for her. I see that my role in her life as homeschool teacher of math and english and science and history may be finished, but a teacher I will remain for as long as I live and as long as she is willing to listen. With only a few years left to homeschool my son, I see that there is so much more to teach; so much more to learn. And I fear that it cannot be done in three years. Even after he has walked down the aisle of homeschool graduation, real or hypothetical, he will still need to be guided by his dad and by me.

Even when we’re faced with an empty nest, I seriously doubt that it will remain unvisited by our two. For you see, investing twelve years of your life in a child’s education and maturation, spending every day together, yields rewards that will be seen and heard and felt for many generations to come. Every time I start to think that my kids may have missed out on something like the prom, or being socialized, or being in AP classes, or being class President, I am reminded by a non-homeschooling friend that my kids are pretty great, by nothing more than a casual compliment of how special they are. So, while my kids may have missed out on some of the above, they have been spared from repeated broken hearts, the need to fight for the attentions of the opposite sex, compromised values, bodies soiled by drugs and alcohol, and so much more.  

Homeschooling becomes about more than just reading, writing, and arithmetic. It becomes about life skills, matters of the heart, discernment, teaching kids to be leaders for the Lord regardless of the rewards or penalties, and so much more. I see that while we do have to get them prepared for the “real world” or working and surviving, etc., our main goal should be preparing them for their life’s call. Although knowing how to solve a trigonometry problem by using the law of cosines is important in trig class, it probably won’t be used much later in life by the average person. Knowing how to diagram sentences will help us all to be better communicators, but if we’re not communicating the message of Christ to the lost and to our wayward friends, then it doesn’t matter how well our words are spoken.

It hasn’t always been easy, but looking back, I can see that it was totally worth it.

Always Homeschooling

One thing I love about homeschooling is that we always seem to be in a perpetual state of learning. Even when we don’t think we’re learning and we don’t care to learn, we learn.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband found some eggs hidden in the soil of the garden our church has planted for the community we live in. He brought them home to hatch. Of course, I was sure that they were snake eggs and didn’t want anything to do with them. He placed them in a fish bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, poked a few holes for air, and then just watched them. Nothing happened. Until last night, that is. Suddenly, we discovered little skinks hatching out of them.  They were so cute!

This came on the coattails of the fish tank full of tadpoles my husband collected from our pond… 

Today, my daughter and I were releasing the little skinks at the edge of the woods by our house when she sat back on the ground onto a yellow jacket!!! We thought she had sat on a pinecone at first. Within minutes she was having an allergic reaction and it scared us to death. Her eyes swelled and she broke out in hives, etc. A few Benadryl did the trick, though.  She’s sore and drowzy, but okay.

Tonight while my husband was working in our garden, he found a shrew.  Of course, he captured it!  He brought it in and my son began playing with it.  Until it nipped at him. No blood drawn, so that’s good. We put the little booger in an old hamster cage and fed it some earth worms. It was really cute. When my daughter got in, my son proceeded to show it to her.  What an exciting event…until it escaped through the bars of the cage.  Praise the Lord we were able to get the cage outside and release the little guy before he turned his teeth on my son again.    Imagine if we had gotten up in the morning to find the cage empty!!!!

So, I guess we can just say this is a day in the life of a homeschooler, huh?  Even when your kids are 14, 17, and 43, I guess they never stop liking little creatures and exploring the great outdoors…yellow jacket stings and all.

A Legacy

This week one of my aunts passed away; a younger sister to my mom.  I didn’t know her well, even though I have known her my entire life.  It’s weird how you can be related to someone and not really know a lot about that person.  This aunt was someone who I saw twice a year at Easter and Thanksgiving and someone to whom I exchanged the typical pleasantries. But that truly was about it.  When my cousin gave the eulogy, I realized that THE woman she spoke of was not a woman that I knew. 

 

My mother was the second born out of four girls.  She was closest to her older sister.  My aunt that passed was closest to the baby of the family.  Therefore, I was closest to my cousins who were the children of my mom’s older sister.  My aunt who passed also worked full time, so we did not get together with her much when I was a child.  I did not know about my aunt’s salvation experience or even if there was one. I didn’t know what her hobbies were. I didn’t know much about her except that she was a faithful employee of the same company for almost 40 years. I guess I could have tried harder to get to know her after mom died, but there were obstacles that I didn’t take the time to move out of the way.  My life was busy and so was hers.  I guess it just never occurred to either of us.  I realized at the funeral that often times we say we know someone, but we don’t really know them.  The people that do know them are the ones who are with them day in and day out. 

 

I have tried to be purposeful in getting to know my niece; she’s the only one I have. I want to make sure that she really knows me.  I want her to know I’m not perfect (it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out) and I want her to know that I love her even though we don’t get to see each other more than a few times a year.  We do communicate through email and we talk on the phone every few weeks.  I want her to know my hobbies, my interests, my goals in life…I want her to know as much about me as she wants to know.  I want to remain friends with her even after my own children have left the nest.  I think it is important to pour ourselves into the lives of others and for others to pour themselves into us. 

 

I pray that when it is my time to go, the funeral home will be busting at the seams with people coming to remember what a crazy, funny, sweet, deep, and loving person I was.  I hope they will forget about my flaws, for they are many; or at least be able to laugh at them as I do.  Most of all, I pray that it is said of me that I lived my life in reckless abandon for the Lord, that I stood my ground on moral issues and didn’t lower my standards when it came to my values, and that people feel closer to Him because they knew me.  (I sure hope I have at least sixty more years to accomplish that goal because I’m a long way away from it.) 

Waiting for the baby

One of my dearest friends had a baby at 1:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and I had the privilege of being there.  She has two elementary aged children already, so this wasn’t exactly her first birth, but it was her first baby as a Christian.  I have watched her blossom over the past five years and she is simply one of the most precious individuals I know.  She has truly given her life to the Lord and walks purely by faith every single day.  Several years ago, she and her husband decided that they probably wouldn’t have any more children because she had always had troubled pregnancies, miscarriage, bedrest, etc.  When she first became a Christian, she devoted one day a week to a ministry she started where she would go to the hospital and deliver care baskets to mothers on bedrest.  She offered her time as a gift to the Lord.

Anyway, last year, she began to feel that God was not finished with her yet and that maybe she was supposed to have more children.  She left this matter completely up to the Lord and sure enough, she soon became pregnant.  Our prayers were that this pregnancy would be successful and that it would result in a perfectly healthy baby.  She called this her spiritual baby because he was a product of her walk with the Lord and the evidence that God had moved in her life and in the life of her husband.

She called me at 8:30 p.m. Monday and said they were on the way to the hospital and that things were moving along quickly.  So, my daughter and I rushed up there. The doctor said he’d be born around 11:00 p.m.  11:00 p.m. came and the baby wasn’t here yet.  My friend’s spirits were up, though.  She was tired, but still talking on her cell phone to friends and family.  Midnight came and then 1:00 a.m.  We were all getting a bit worried.  Then finally, her sister came in and said that it was time.  We still had to wait until 2:00 a.m. to get back in there to see her and the precious baby boy that God had brought into our lives.

I realized that night that whenever we have problems in our lives, issues that need to be resolved, prayers that we haven’t seen answered yet, etc., that it is much like having a baby.  There’s lots of waiting that goes on.  We are so impatient sometimes for God to answer our prayers quickly and maybe we can learn a lesson or two from my friend.  You see, when you are pregnant, there’s nothing you can do but wait.  You can’t have a full-term baby any quicker than nine months (actually ten months, if you count it by weeks).  You can’t rush delivery either, unless you have an elective c-section, but even then, you’re waiting.  You can’t rush the nurses either when you want to hold your baby.  They will give him or her to you when it’s safe to do so.  Wow!!! If we could all learn to wait upon the Lord like a pregnant woman waits for her baby.

And when we do get that answer to prayer (whether it’s what we wanted or not) do we look at it and into the eyes of God like a new mother looks into the eyes of her baby?  Not usually.  Most of the time we say a quick thanks and then move on to the next prayer request.

I just want to say thank you to God for all the blessings he’s given me in my life, including the blessing of seeing my sweet friend continue her walk with the Lord.

My Devotional Reviewed!

I started getting sales last week that I had no idea where they were coming from. I usually know how someone hears about me before I get an order.  So, I did some fishing and found out that Cindy with Homeschooling From the Heart had reviewed my Bible Study.  I was so excited.  Check it out.  She only gave me a B+ rating, but I’ll take it. 

Here is the direct link:

http://www.homeschoolingfromtheheart.com/hsreviews/teachme.html

http://www.homeschoolingfromtheheart.com/hsreviews.html

A Message from Proverbs today

I try to read a chapter of Proverbs everyday.  Some days I read something else and then go back and read several chapters at a time.  Today, I started over with Proverbs for the month…a day behind already.

Proverbs 1:8-9 says: Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.  They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.

I’ve always read these verses and thought to myself, “Yeah, listen to your father. Don’t forsake your mother’s teaching!”  As a homeschooling mother, you know, I thought these verses were like a ball in my court.

Today, as I read this, I thought, “Hey, you know, that’s a lot of pressure on a parent.”  I mean, we have the responsibility of actually giving the children some instruction to listen to and some teaching that’s worth not forsaking, right?  Wow!  It really makes you stop and think about what you’re doing on a daily basis; how you’re walking with the Lord; is it something the kids would want to mimic?

I pray that as I seek the Lord daily, he’ll light the way for my kids to follow in my footsteps. Hopefully, my footsteps will be inside the footsteps of Jesus.

 

Why does Sam’s Club use those milk jugs?

I went to Sam’s Club the other day to buy milk and a few other items. I haven’t been in there in a while.  At first, I thought they were out of milk and then I realized that the jugs were just shaped differently than usual.  They are stackable.  That’s a cool feature.  But we are having the hardest time pouring milk out of those things. We’re losing milk down the side every time we pour.  Dollars are dribbling away.

I like the stackable nature of the jug, but the lid takes too many turns to get it off and the pouring is really difficult because the mouth is so wide. I’m almost 42 years old so I should be able to operate a milk jug correctly, but every time I pour milk all over the place.  What’s the deal?  Has anyone else had this problem?

So, this problem really has nothing to do with anything, except that it irritates me when I go to the frig to get milk. I can’t wait until those four gallons are gone so I can go buy normal milk jugs.

I guess this could be compared to our spiritual walks, somehow.  Like, when God wants us to do something for him and we spread ourselves all over the place…everywhere except for where he intended us to be?  Maybe that’s it.  Well, that’s a waste.  We need to be determined to hit the mark God wants us to; the perverbial glass so to speak.  Don’t spill yourself all over the counter. 

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine 2008 Promo includes 25 gifts!!!

If you haven’t heard about the Old Schoolhouse Magazine, it’s a great one.  There are always plenty of encouraging articles to help homeschooling moms throughout the year. 

They are gearing up for their Spring promo and asked me to share the below link with you.  I thought some of you might enjoy the magazine.  Click the link below to find out more about it. 

http://www.theoldschoolhousestore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=66_60&products_id=1542

 The above link will show you the pictures of your free gifts plus give you all the details. 

 

 

Why I’m Not Blogging Anymore

Not really!!!  That was the question posted, so I thought I’d give a little cliffhanger title to freak you out.  (That one’s for you, Michele.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship.  What is it?  What its requirements are?  How much should a friend expect from us as a friend?  How much should we expect from that friend?

I’ve wondered why is it that we call someone a best friend and love all her quirks and faults and say that’s who she is and that’s why we love her, but then…when we need her to be “there” for us, or to apologize, or to be more intuitive, or something else that’s probably outside of her personality, and she’s not, we throw up our hands in the air and crush that friend with hurtful, hateful words? 

Why is it that what we need we don’t often express until we are in a desperate moment and then we hurt those whom we love because they don’t infer what our problems are or that we even have problems?  Why is it that we expect that friend to meet those needs?  These are the questions that have been flying around my house for the last few days.  Praise the Lord I haven’t been the object of the questions…this time around.

When you first make a friend, there is something about that person that attracts you.  You don’t look at the flaws that person has.  You simply love whatever THAT quality is that attracted you.  You make her your friend, for better or worse.  The flaws don’t matter.  You may have different friends that you have different things in common with and you call on that friend when you want to do that particular thing.

So, why is it that when we start to notice that our friend doesn’t listen enough and talks too much (I’ve never been accused of that), or doesn’t say thank you, or is late all the time, or doesn’t do any number of things we may want her to do, it then starts to bother us?  After all, we want that friend to do what we need her to do precisely when we need her to do it.

It’s selfishness that causes this. When we start focusing on our needs and how someone isn’t meeting them, we’re being selfish.  When we say she is selfish, we’re being selfish for saying how selfish that person is.  Isn’t that an oxymoron? I have been guilty of doing this numerous times.  Also, jealousy usually is a factor in the equation.  The things that we support our friend in is suddenly the thing we resent her for and we call her boastful, on a powertrip, and more.

So, I have figured out the true meaning of friendship.  Friendship is when you accept someone for her flaws. You don’t expect her to be your everything. You remember that her love is shown to you simply by the act of being a friend.  And, you try to be sensitive to her needs, while remembering that you’re not the one who can satisfy all needs and she can’t satisfy yours, and you’re not supposed to.  Only the Lord can do that.  If your friend gives you a quirky little gift that you don’t really like, what do you do with it?  You save it because it came from her, right?  So, why is it that when the disagreements come, you think about how she never shows love in your “love language”?  You can’t do that.  You can’t throw things like that up.  You take the token of friendship, no matter what it is, for what it is…love.

Remember, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of your life.  When making friends, remember not to be all-absorbed with that person.  It’s too much.  Remember that there is supposed to be equal give and take with friendship, but if your friend isn’t in a place to give right now, that’s okay.  Cut her some slack.  Show some grace.  AND…if you make a friend more to you than your Savior, then you’re setting that friendship up for failure.