REAL WEALTH

For many years there has been one game show that I have enjoyed watching. Since it fit into my involuntary down time, which I justify by calling it my re-creation time, (that being when my productivity zeros out after 6 pm in the evening,) I have been able to be a fairly frequent viewer of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. For years, night after night I have racked up thousands of dollars as I gleefully answered the first five questions in the quest of becoming a Millionaire. I was especially excited when they changed the amount gained for the first five questions from $1000 to $5000. My imaginary wealth was stockpiling even faster than it had in the not as good old days before the change. For some reason there is always emptiness to my riches while watching Millionaire just like there was when I saw the money, hotels, railroads and utilities pile up on my side of the board as I was winning at the game of Monopoly. For some reason the merchants of the real world have never been willing to exchange their products for my imaginary wealth. (By the way, I am especially adept at answering questions at all levels during the reruns.)

I have noticed that as the questions become less trivial and more significant that my ability to answer with confidence decreases as the value placed on the correct answer increases. I suspect this reverse correlation of my knowledge and the significance of the information is a telling evaluation of what I have been filling my mind with over the years. I am constantly failing to move to a higher level of questions because of not knowing those things which I had plenty of opportunity to learn or which have been lost to damaged neurons in my mind. What a testimony to the doctrine of forever learning but never coming to…

I find that when I am multi-tasking I am usually involved in multi-trivial activities rather than adding to my storehouse of that which is of true value. Since I have become somewhat of an expert in the trivial I can say with some certainty that it is very possible to be involved in several insignificant activities at more or less the same time without putting too much taxation on one’s capabilities, while success in the weightier questions of life demand total concentration and absolute singular involvement.

My pondering moves to another evaluation which is coming nearer with each passing day. The moment I have to account for the days of my life to that Judge who already knows all things. Somehow the frightening vision comes into my mind of two piles being placed before me. The first, a giant pile of what looks like Monopoly money, but in reality are paper bills bearing stirring semblances of the trivial things I had spent so much of my life being involved in because I counted them as of value. The second, a significantly smaller stack of pieces of pure gold which bore bright portraits of people I felt I had spent too little time being involved with which the Lord counted as having real value. At that moment I had the feeling that the emptiness which comes at the end of the game show Millionaire or a successful game of Monopoly, will wilt in comparison with the profoundly depleted feeling I will be left with as I view the tremendous pile of trivialness I have spent my limited allotted time on during the brief mortal passage.

As I sifted through the giant pile of the semblances of the trivial activities of my mortal span it reminded me that much too much of my life had been spent moving my ‘boot’ to the command of the dice around the man-made Monopoly board of mortality. It seemed like I had spent a lifetime being obsessed with the accumulation of stuff and going to places and greeting people which would have but momentary importance. What a shock when the next roll of the dice destroyed all that I had gained up to that point and put me on a path of survival rather than accumulation. In the face of a new found knowledge of the realities of Eternity, I at once found myself substantially saddened by the sight of what I once had thought to have been of such great worth, but now had become a terrible testimony of how I had only imagined their value.

The tender mercy of the Lord with a simple gesture of his hand drew my attention away from that mountain of insignificant minutia over to the small pile of pure gold pieces. He first pointed to an engraved picture of a beautiful young bride dressed in white standing in a portrait at my right side. Very close was another piece which was etched with the likeness of five sons and a daughter. They were surrounded with other pieces bearing the likeness of grandchildren, parents, friends and companions I had walked with in both the First as well as the Second estates of my life. I found pieces which reminded me of mentors and others who called themselves students. I found pieces with bright portraits of loved ones which were cast in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, California, Mexico, Colombia and smaller pieces which brought bright recollection of times spent growing my abundant store of dear friends.

It didn’t take many seconds before I completely understood that the pile of paper bills bore the fleeting semblances of the trivial stuff I had once thought to be of such importance in my mortal sojourn, while the pieces of pure gold were permanently engraved with the images of the people with which I had been privileged to associate, lasting images of brothers and sisters whom I had been able to spend sufficient time to develop meaningful relationships.

Then the Lord did an interesting thing, He placed the pile of insignificant bills on one side of a scale and the gold pieces on the other. My eyes filled with tears as I gratefully realized that the relationships of my life far outweighed what had seemed to be an overwhelming stack of stuff and silliness. I was grateful indeed that from His view upon His tower of tender Mercy He was able to see that in all my going and getting I had taken time to gather stores of real wealth measured by those I had been privileged to be involved with, while I from my myopic view had mistakenly thought the other temporary things were what it was all about.

As I shake myself from that introspective moment of pondering in things yet to come, I wake with the appreciation that I have been given one more day to be a little more attentive to those relationships which will be engraven on eternal pieces of pure gold and added to my pile of Real Wealth.