Clash of Clans, sub-prime mortgages, and Dave Ramsey

Stay with me for a minute as I explain why a game that I play on my iphone is connected in my mind to the financial meltdown that happened in America nearly a decade ago and the financial guy from the radio.  For most of the free apps that people play on phones or tablets, the way in which they make money is to get you to purchase the ability to speed things up.  Clash of Clans is much the same, in it you build castle walls to defend your settlement and raise armies to attack the castles of other players.  Each task has a countdown timer ranging from a few seconds for small tasks to several days for the large ones.  If you have the patience to wait for the timer to run its course, the game is entirely free, but if you can't wait that long and want to speed it up, the game makers are more than happy to sell you that ability.
I was re-reading Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money this week, it is a brilliant primer on the history of finance, much like all of his books, and it contains a chapter on home ownership that among other things, explains the debacle of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that engulfed the American housing market during the mid 2000's.  That crisis was, in part, the result of people not being willing to wait until they were financially sound enough to afford a traditional long-term fixed mortgage, or not being willing to wait to save up money for other purposes but instead choosing to utilize the equity in their home by re-financing to give themselves money but at the cost of taking on a mortgage whose terms were certainly not sound in the long-term.
Both of these situations revolve around patience, a virtue that I'm sure has been in short supply throughout history, but also one that seems to be more difficult to uphold in a society that offers so many ways to try to get around having to develop patience.  All of this reminds me of the mantra repeated over and over by Dave Ramsey on his radio program that debt is the enemy and to be avoided at all cost.  Ramsey often tells people, for example, not to take out a loan for a car but instead to save up the cash needed to pay for it outright.  This sort of delayed gratification is of course hard to do, ensuring that short-term gain will always look good to those unwilling to invest in their own future.
This same discussion about patience could be applied to how we take care of ourselves, how we eat and whether or not we regularly exercise, and certainly it applies to our political choices because politicians are consistently going to tell the public what they want to hear now in order to get elected instead of what they need to hear about the future.
As we begin Holy Week, the virtue of patience and long-term investment is necessary for all those who plan on attending church on Easter to fulfill their Christmas-Easter twice a year obligation.  Being a Christian is hard work, it takes dedication and commitment, it takes regular participation, it takes more than being in the house of God twice a year.
If you want to spend $5 to speed up that game on your tablet, go ahead, but when it comes to the important things in life, there's a reason why patience is a virtue.