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Choices: Because you can does not mean you should!
Recently, the Republican Party House of Representatives members approved their policy agenda. Among the proposals is one seeking to provide increased flexibility for every individual. Specifically, the proposal is to create “Universal Savings Accounts,” encouraging individuals to use those accounts to save for retirement. If the House Ways and Means Committee were to follow through with the creation of savings accounts allowing people constant access to funds, for any reason, without tax consequences, that would seem to produce more flexibility and result in greater saving for retirement, would it not?
The problem is the proclivity of human nature: “If access to funds is allowed, access to funds is made.” Every individual and every family should have an fund from which they can withdraw, without tax penalties, to meet the financial requirements of emergencies. However, funds saved and set aside for retirement need to remain untouched until retirement. There are too many stories of couples using IRA account funds to pay off debts leaving insufficient retirement savings. How many have made hardship withdrawals or loans from their retirement savings, for any number of reasons, leaving little or nothing for retirement?
We all have choices to make…every day. We must examine the choices before us, decide which choice is better and follow through with that choice. Every choice is not equally beneficial to us financially…or spiritually. Just because we can make a particular choice does not mean we SHOULD make that choice. The choices we make have consequences.
Allow me to close with the words of C. S. Lewis, “[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.” The responsibility for our choices lies solely with us; we cannot blame another. The consequences of those choices are inescapable. You think about that!
Praying for more to be His,
Reggie Hundley
Executive Director
Mission Services Association, Inc.
the missions network
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