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Luke
10:27
Love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
This is the first and
greater commandment.
And the second is like
unto it;
love your neighbor as
yourself.
A woman at a worship service in Uganda kept
singing praises and saying prayers of thanks for the shoes upon her feet. She went on and on and on. She didn’t give thanks because they were of
the latest fashion, or because she particularly liked the color. No, she felt very blessed to simply have shoes
– any shoes - for many at the service had no shoes at all. And a tear began to
trickle down the cheek of the missionary’s face, for he realized that while he
had given God thanks for many things, he had never thanked Him for shoes. He realized that he had always taken it for
granted that he would have shoes. But
now he understood that even things we take for granted are blessings we
sometimes do not allow ourselves to be aware of.
A wise and ancient guru had a
disciple who had come so far in wisdom and understanding that he decided to
leave him on his own. His disciple lived
quite simply in a tiny hut made of mud; sustained himself each morning after
devotions by daily begging for bread and each evening washed his loincloth and
hung it out to dry.
One morning, he went out to get his
loin cloth and found that overnight rats had gnawed on it until only tattered
shreds were left. He therefore begged
from those around him for another loin cloth, and they gladly gave him one for
this was a holy man. But remember, he
was wise as well as a holy man so he then did what common sense demanded. He got himself a cat.
But as often happens, one solution only
serves up another problem. Now he needed
milk for his cat. This became
increasingly difficult to obtain so naturally he now acquired a cow. Ah, complications increased. Now he needed fodder for the cow, so he
decided to till and plant the ground around his hut. And soon he was so very, very busy tending
cat, and cow, and crops that he had no time for contemplation.
Wisdom was soon served again. He hired servants to tend his farm and give
him help in other ways. He began to
wonder at some of his recent decisions but what else could he do?
Daily he was becoming more weary,
for now there was so much to care for and worry about that he consulted himself
in a question and answer time. What can
I do? The answer that came was
obvious. Obtain more wealth and let
others work and worry for him. Soon he
was the wealthiest man in the village.
At just about this time his guru
was traveling in the region again and stopped by to see his disciple. He was overwhelmed by all the changes that
had been made. The mud hut had been
replaced by a well built home surrounded by so much land that the once little
plot was now a vast estate. There were
busy servants scurrying about. Everywhere a kind of buzz about the place.
The guru paused and then asked,
“What is the meaning of all of this?”
“You won’t believe this, master,”
came back the reply. “It was the only way I could keep my loincloth.”
What am I saying?
Perhaps life as we know it is an Eden
we have created, or is it by chance an Eden
we have reworked until it is not so much an Eden any more. It isn’t that simple, but then maybe it is. Or as Thoreau once said, “We are happy in
proportion to what we can learn to live without.” However, if no matter how much we have, we
are never satisfied…now there is a different matter.
(TO BE
CONTINUED)
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