Are you a Mrs. Dodge? Take pity!
Teach your children the value of hard work and patience.
Inspire them to strive on with stories of people who made it through the rain.
Enlighten them to welcome the challenges that come because they mold them into stronger persons.
Impart God's Word which teaches the joy and rewards of hard work.
In a world of Toyotas, Hondas, Mitsubishis, and Nissans, few people are familiar with Dodge, an American car brand. In 1914, John and Horace Dodge introduced the Dodge automobile. In the '20s, when Ford was the leading car brand, the Dodge was already selling at a volume of 150,000 units a year. The brothers' joint fortune then was around $200 million, roughly equivalent to $1.5 billion today.
Unexpectedly, John Dodge died in 1920 and his brother Horace followed a few months later. An immense amount of money was left to their wives, ex-wives, and their eight children - all of whom did not know anything about managing the business.
Horace Jr. tried working on the factory floor for a few weeks. But unlike his father, who rose up early each morning and went straight to work, the young Dodge explained that getting up at six was the hardest part of the job.
Whom did Junior pick-up after? Mrs. Dodge was the kind of mother who did not want her children to spend time with hot and greasy machines. Thus, the younger Dodges shunned hard work and became devoted to high and upscale living while suing each other for more money.
Because the '20s was a time of economic unrest, the Dodge disasters were the talk of the town. The press feasted on their financial fiascoes, divorces, speeding tickets, and jail sentences. They eventually lost everything - wealth, influence, reputation, and self-respect.
Tragic stories of children squandering their fathers' wealth built by hard work for so hardly are a common refrain.
One such story is of Cornelius Vanderbilt who was the richest person in the world until his death in 1877. At that time, he left his heirs an estate larger than the United States' treasury. Seventy years after, the last of the great Vanderbilt mansions that once lined Manhattan's Fifth Avenue was torn down to rubble. In 1973, when 120 of Vanderbilt's descendants held their first family reunion, not any one of them was a millionaire.
I have heard many established businessmen say: "I know what it is to be poor. I am what I am today because I have worked with the sweat of my brow and the grip of my hands. Never will I allow my children to experience hardships and poverty as I did in the past." In our society, this is the cliche heard in many rags-to-riches movie and TV drama scripts. I cannot help but refer to this as a life principle that will result in weak and incompetent personalities. Fathers who saw this seem to have forgotten that it was the poverty they grew up with that gave them the strength and drive to strive for bigger things. Children raised with this principle will grow up helpless, spoiled, and unable to face life's risks with courage and perseverance. What a waste!