It was long before the financial carnage of late 2008 that I first heard about a bank “calling a loan.” I was working at a firm that sold financial analysis of small publicly traded companies, and somewhere along the way I heard the story of a company whose bank had decided that the $50,000 this company owed was now, instead of due in payments over time, due in full inside 90 days.
“What? Are you kidding me? How can someone with integrity change the terms that were agreed to when the signatures hit the paper?”
As it turns out, I learned that those are part of the terms on the paper. And some person at that company who was responsible for taking out the loan is now responsible for that decision that put the company in bind.
Even cursory peeks at what the Bible says about money stuff find exhortations to avoid debt, calling debtors slaves of the lenders. But I’m particularly amused with how the author of Ecclesiastes (who many think was Solomon, history’s richest dude) in the context of futility. Here’s someone with money and women and seemingly unlimited choices repeatedly saying that anything short of an eternal perspective is “hebel”: a vapor, a breath, a “vanity.”
Vanity?
Yeah, our own ideas, strivings, machinations… all rolled up to this beautifully ambiguous idea that thinking we’ve got some idea of what success is a fart in the wind.
Lesson: we radically overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Especially in light of eternal perspectives.
So choose your favorite maxim…
“Buy real estate because nobody’s making any more of it.”
“Investing in the stock market is safe in the long term because it always goes up in the long term.”
“It’s okay to buy this new car because the better gas mileage will save us enough to make the payment.”
…and then punt.
Borrowing is like chili for lunch… you’ve got a pretty good shot at farting into the winds of eternity.