HISTORIAN Will Durant describes the Romans who lived just before Christ: “Everyone longed for money. Everyone judged or was judged in terms of money.” It was a pretty poor yardstick for measuring real wealth then, and it’s no better now.
Recently my three brothers (ages 38-60!), my 83-year-old
father, and one nephew (thirty-something), met at Robert Lee,
(Bois d’arc means “iron wood” in French. I’ll tell you, the fruit is pretty solid, too! I knew those yahoos would hurl some my way, but men of the cloth have big voices and rag arms. I figured I was safe, as long as they were aiming at me; it was the blind hurl approach that really worried me!)
I dislike painting so much that I tore through a couple of hundred yards of weedeater line to avoid it, occasionally lugging the smoking weedeater past my paintbrush-wielding siblings so I could reload and mutter, “You ain’t a power tool operator, you ain’t diddly!”, refuel, and fire up again. Alas, I ran out of weeds. Rather than stoop to painting, I dug a ditch and built a stone-lined fire pit.
We used to have grand bonfires before Robert Lee modernized and passed a no-burning ordinance. Now we need a pit and a token Oscar Meyer tube steak to be legal. So I built the pit.
That night we sat around a fine fire, and my father, always a ceremonial sort, announced, “Fellows, I want to make a speech.” Shorter than the speech old Moses delivered in Deuteronomy just before his people were to enter the Promised Land, it was, to me, no less moving. The patriarch of our clan, the man who gave us life and love and leadership, the strongest, gentlest man I have ever known, simply told us how proud he was of us and what we are doing. He gave us, I suppose you could say, his blessing.
My grandparents, both sides, were not wealthy people. My dad was an amazingly fine money manager just to survive on parson’s pay with five kids. He won’t have many dollars to leave us.
But what he gave last weekend and what we sharednlove, respect, gratitudencan’t be bought at any price. I think Dad felt pretty rich as we sat around the fire that night. I know I did.
Jesus put it this way: “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
Never has. Never will.