"The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any." Katherine Whitehorn

Uff-dah.

I'm still working on the VW wiring. I really thought I had an hour or so left to go when I quit Saturday but I've already got four hours since then and I'm not done. Part of the problem is that I found a mistake. There are ten pages of instructions and the last four are diagrams. I had one of them upside down when I made the connections at the fuse box. But hey, I caught it before I burned something up.
The net effect of that (caught) error is that I have no confidence that the rest of it is correct. The original wiper switch was broken and a repro isn't available. The closest option, from a later year, has different connections requiring deviation from the instructions. And unless I did something wrong this morning (what? me??) I have two wires that are supposed to connect to the same terminal on the back of the speedometer.

I leave in six days and have a ton of things to get done before then. Some of it is outside where it's HOT. (At 8 p.m. it's 103.) Today I fertilized the iris, changed the wiper blades on the Kia and cleaned the lily pond. I don't know how the people with outdoor jobs do it.

That quote up at the top? Truth
Early in my career I got paid very little, but I knew what to expect when I chose ministry as a profession. Pam and I were both raised in homes of modest means so living simply wasn't a shock. About the time I'd been at it long enough to earn a decent wage I went back to teach at the college and took a 30% pay cut.

The boys understood the situation, but from time to time even they would want something outside our ability to procure. We'd explain that if we could we might, or might not. But we couldn't, so it was out of the question. As they got older that occasionally led to some difficulty, but it's not like we had options.

I'm proud of the men our sons have become. They are our greatest joy (except maybe for their wives). They both have a very strong work ethic, they value service, and put people way above things. Would they be the same men if we'd had the ability to buy them the cool shoes, the new game system, the nice bikes? Maybe. But if you ask them they'll tell you not having that stuff taught them lessons they could not have otherwise learned.

Would we have bought them those things if we'd had the means? I'm afraid we would have.
Sometimes God blesses us by what he doesn't provide.