A kings ransom

Luke 21:1-4

        Just as there are energy givers and energy vampires, there are people who are simply givers and those that seem to be takers. What is in your heart?

        At the heart of all giving is thankfulness. What are we thankful for ? I would bet that if we feel thankful for wads of material goods or even thankful that we "earned" wads of material things, we don't really get the point of being thankful. Thankfulness is something rooted in being alive, in being loved and has far less to do with anything material at all. In this way, if you truly are thankful, you are much more willing to part with anything or everything material. Why? Because you know that true happiness is not derived from anything man made. Happiness comes from all those intangibles such as love and peace. Money can't buy those. In the face of this scenario, the widow is willing to give an inordinately large percentage of her 'wealth' in thankfulness to God. When you think your happiness comes from material things, you want to horde whatever it is you have and consequently, give less.

       This kind of thinking turns the world as we experience it on end. Much of our world is based on the material. Many years ago, just before my mother fell ill from a stroke and was subsequently hospitalized and wound up living in a long term care facility, she inherited what many would consider a nice house. The location was somewhat obscure though. It was in an old mining town in the northern most region of the country. It's value was based in to opposing paradigms. On a material front it was simply a house with a set monetary value. It's location made that substantial but not as much had it been located in some other more desirable area in which case it would have fetched a tidy sum. The real value came from the fact that it had been our family homestead, the last vestige of a large immigrant French Canadian family that settled in this region ..... God only knows why. The other less likely reason for it's value was that it was in fact situated directly next to a Roman Catholic church, one that my mother had frequented as a child. For this reason my mother decided to give her portion of this house to the church. The value of this gift was still much more than her annual income but she was less wise about material things and perhaps a bit more like the woman with the two copper coins. My mother had a grasp of true happiness and faith in God. Scandals not yet revealed, the Roman Catholic church had offered her much as a youth and untill the day she passed.  The best part of this scenario and perhaps entertaining in light of this passage is the Internal Revenue Service's attempts to try to wrap their heads around the fact that she gave a donation greater than her annual income, however meager it was. It seemed to smell of being a scam.

         Many times our thankfulness may be judged as foolish or at odds with a practical, material world. By the same token, those things that we are thankful for may seem foolish, things like love and faith, family and friends. These things money cannot buy but are worth a kings ransom. 

        

He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’