I remember my father saying something about a stock he owned years ago. I asked him why he owned General Motors common stock. This was back when I was trying to make my fortune through investments, and I thought I knew an awful lot. His answer surprised me. “GM may not go up as much as a lot of the other stocks that you could find, but you have to figure that if GM ever goes under, then we’ve got a lot bigger problems than just some lost money. The whole country would have to go under.”
At about that same time, my dad owned stock in White Trucks, the company that made White Freightliners. In those days, White trucks probably made up something like forty percent of the over-the-road trucking fleet in this country. They seemed like another safe bet. No, they weren’t as impregnable as General Motors, but they sure seemed to have the market share and future to encourage confidence. That was before White Trucks went belly up. Before long, we had parleyed a $10,000 investment into about $500. The truck business was purchased from bankruptcy by Volvo and we were left with something called Northeast Ohio Axle. To the best I could ever understand, their biggest endeavor was making conversion vans.
We’ve seen plenty of giants in the world of business fall over the years. In Kansas City, many people made fine careers at TWA when it was one of the elite airlines. And today? TWA is just a glimmer of nostalgia. In fact, any airline that ever makes a hub in Kansas City, no matter how powerful it might seem, can be expected to file for bankruptcy within a couple of years.
We can see these sorts of collapses in other fields as well. Who would have ever thought that Sears could fall from the undisputed champion of retail to just another player among many? Who would have expected Montgomery Ward to disappear altogether? And whatever happened to AMC, the American Motor Company, the people who brought us the Pacer and the Gremlin?
The bottom line, of course, is that, despite the basic soundness of my dad’s philosophy, there’s no such thing as a safe investment. Yes, General Motors is too big to completely go away without a complete collapse of our economy, but it’s certainly not as strong now as it was twenty years ago. Where will it be in another fifty years? Who can say?
What Hosea describes today is a nation that experienced the sort of success that GM has experienced over the years. “Israel was a spreading vine; he brought forth fruit for himself.” There’s not a thing wrong with bringing forth fruit, but it is wrong to give the credit for that fruit to the wrong source. It’s also wrong to assume that the fruit will invariably keep appearing.
There’s a temptation we all face when we experience success. On the first day of success we remember that God gave us the victory, but by day one hundred, we can be tempted to think ourselves the victors. Hosea would remind us that, just like General Motors, we are nothing beyond what God has decreed us to be.
Tune My Heart is primarily an aid to the devotional life of its author, Mark Browning, who holds the copyright for this material. It is provided online in hopes that some will find it edifying. All contents, unless otherwise noted, may be redistributed freely provided that you give credit for its origin and do not charge anything.