Hidden Costs

American Airlines will start charging $15 to check a bag on any AA flight.

First it started with charging for meals and snacks served in flight. Then some airlines started charging for checking a second bag. Imagine the endless possibilites: they could charge $10 for use of the ramp to board the plane, $5 to turn on the light above your seat, $12 to turn on the air conditioning, $25 per pillow or blanket, $8 to use the restroom. Maybe they will even start charging $100 or so for a seat itself. Otherwise, you could pretend you're riding a busy subway and stand while holding to a strap hanging from the ceiling.

The kind of thinking which brought about this latest American Airlines move makes it easier to understand why airlines are having such economic troubles in the first place. Common sense seems to be in short supply in modern life and nowhere is that more evident than in the airline industry. Everyone understands that airlines use fuel when they fly. That fuel comes from oil and the cost of oil is exorbitant. We don't like it, but we understand that the cost of flying has to go up. Airlines can't cope with a doubling of fuel prices without passing the cost along to their customers.

So the complaint here isn't that it will cost an extra fifteen bucks to fly from Point A to Point B. What I don't like is the nickel-and-diming. It isn't straightforward and above board.

However, it does illustrate a lesson about hidden costs. Throughout life, there are hidden costs. That's why they always tell us to be sure to read the fine print. The major life decisions we make all come with some costs.

That is certainly true with the moral compromises that a great many people have bought into in the last generation. When the "sexual revolution" came along in the 1960s and 1970s, people were told they at last had the freedom to enjoy themselves without guilt or consequences. But "free love" had a lot of hidden costs, from sexually transmitted diseases to failed birth control measures (and unwanted pregnancies) to the destructive havoc this reworking of the moral order wrought in modern family life.

The Supreme Court offered a solution to the unwanted pregnancy problem in 1973 when it rendered its Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortions. Abortion has always been billed in high-sounding terms as the free exercise of a woman's right to choose what happens with her own body. The truth, however, is that the great majority of abortions take place because women got pregnant when they didn't want to be pregnant. In other words, abortions serve as after-the-fact birth control. The hidden costs here are enormous. First (and not so hidden) is the fact that some forty million or more lives have been taken in atrocious acts that make the mass slaughters of past history pale into relative insignificance. Add to that the guilt now being felt by millions of women who have come to understand the role they played in having their own babies killed. Indeed the cost of sin is high.

However, it is also true that godly Christian people face some hidden costs in the decisions they make to follow Christ. Jesus never promised us lives free from trouble and adversity. In fact, we can count on the fact that we will suffer in one way or another because of our Christianity. Is the suffering worth it? Of course it is. Heaven is worth it all . . . whatever we have to go through as we strive to remain "faithful unto death" is not to be compared with the greatness of the inheritance we'll receive in heaven. However, there is a price to be paid in living lives of faithful Christian service and we have to be prepared for it.

So whether from our good choices or our bad choices, there are consequences. As my children were growing up, I tried very hard to drill into their thinking the reality that choices have consequences. That is always true, even if we don't always see the costs right away when we make the decisions we make.