Thursday, January 31, 2013

Not Grasping Riches



I was cleaning up some old notes and ran across these snippets.  They inspired me this morning.  Maybe they'll encourage you too.  I'll share one today and one tomorrow.


Not Grasping Riches
From Metropolitan Anthony Bloom: Wealth in one area often is accompanied by poverty in another.  What has been given us is our possession, but if we hold on to it, we lose something.  Wealth was meant to pass through our hands, not be held tightly in our grasp.  Wealth of all kinds.
In passing through our hands, it becomes offering.  Thus our whole lives are offering for we did not will oursleves into existence.  We do not have breath and strength and intelligence because we somehow made ourselves have life; our intelligence is something that will pass away; and we did not determine for ourselves in our mother's womb our intelligence, our social grace, our physical beauty, the family into which we would be born, the opportunities in life with which we would be presented.  All of these are gifts given to us, not that we might possess them firmly and permanently, but that they might pass through our hands as gifts from God and now also gifts from us, we participating in God's work of gracious giving.  For If God did not give us something to give, we would have nothing to offer, but God does give richly: to one, one kind of riches to another, another.   Just as Christ did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself...and thus was highly exalted, so we must learn not to grasp, but to empty ourselves (which is our sharing in Cross of Christ) that we may share in Christ's exaltation.

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