WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE OF?
October 4, 2009As I ate dinner after Vespers, I got a text message from a friend which read, “You seem to be in deep thought about something!” I figured he must be somewhere in the food court observing me. I looked around. True enough from a not-so-distant section I saw him waving. He was right, I was thinking. Reflecting on the sermon, I asked myself, “Jon, what could you want more of?”
My question reminded me of a story by the great Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy tells the story of a greedy man named, Pahom, who was obsessed by amassing great wealth in land. One day he learned of a wonderful and unusual opportunity to get more land. For only 1,000 rubles he could have the entire area that he could walk around in a day, but he had to make it back to the starting point by the sunset or he would lose everything that he invested.
He arose early and set out. He walked on and on thinking that he could get just a little more land if he kept straining forward for the prize he sought, but he went so far that he realized he must walk very fast if he was going to get back to the starting point and claim the land. As the sun set lower in the sky, he quickened his pace. He began to run. He came within sight of the finishing goal and exerted his last energies plunging over the finish line, falling to the ground, dead.
His servant took a spade and dug a grave. He made it just long enough and just wide enough to match Pahom’s body and buried him. Here’s the title Tolstoy gave his story: “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” He ends the short morality tale with this line: “Six feet from his head to his heels was all that man needed”.
What do you want more of? What prize are you striving for? Healthy humans always want more of something, I think. One afternoon on Orchard Road, Singapore, I passed by the Apple® Store and saw a 15-inch MacBookPro that costs S$2,800 and thought, “Lord, I want that!” A few minutes later I saw the latest iPodTouch at S$320, and I thought, “Lord, I want that too!- Those two items would surely help me with my music and video production for church!”
People who know me are aware that I am not materialistic. I have no penchant for the latest electronic and digital gadgetry. My TV and DVD player were gifts. My mobile phone turns two this December. I don’t even own a watch. I have a strange tendency to spare an amount each week and invite people out for coffee or dinner and talk to them about life, the Christian walk, ministry, ideas, the Bible, etc- in both intentional and “unintentional” discipleship settings. So even though I know a MacBookPro would help me in my music and worship ministry, I am not saving for it, anyway, I have a seven year old Dell Latitude which my older sister gave me that still works, no matter how slow it may be, like now!
In the wake of the devastating typhoon last week I had a conversation with my dad who lost everything in our house to the flood. One of things he said, ”I saved nothing out of everything. These are all but things. Things do not define us. It is who we are that does, that we are children of God. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be His name!” In that instant, God reminded me that while it isn’t wrong to strive for a MacbookPro or a Honda Civic, those things will never define me.
When Christians are at their best – and granted, often we aren’t – but, when at our best we really do sense and then grasp the truth in Paul’s wisdom, that astonishing human transformation occurs in the movement from self-dependence to God dependence. From striving for vainglory to striving for a higher righteousness; from pressing to assert our superiority, to pressing for authentic humility; from straining for perishable prizes, to straining for imperishable; from despair to hope, from fear to love, from death to life.
In fact, in the matter of our living and breathing there is no résumé or ledger that’s better than any other, no pedigree, no fortune or lack thereof, no human prize that gives us an edge in straining forward in utter dependence upon God’s grace. (jlas.bauman)
