Ecclesiastes 11:2: How to be Profligate
Corrugated (Photo credit: Andrea Kirkby) |
“Be generous: Invest in acts of charity. Charity yields high returns. Don’t hoard your goods; spread them around. Be a blessing to others. This could be your last night” Eccl 11:1-2(from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved.)
Like corrugated warts, storage barns have cropped up all over the countryside. People have so much junk, they now need to rent these pleated sheds to hold it all. If these hoarders are anything like me, those buildings hold cheap Christmas decorations (especially strings of lights with one burnt bulb so none on the string light), stuffed animals and worn-out sheets that have a few good uses left in them. Few hold the treasures you see discovered in Storage Wars.
How about you? What would happen if you were to die tonight? Remember that old guy in the New Testament who built bigger barns to store all his goods? Didn’t come to a good end.
_6300258 “Shed” (Photo credit: spootonium) |
Why not try something decidedly un-materialistic? Give it away. Be generous. What can you gain?
- Space in your study
- A happy friend or neighbor who really needed that thingy
- A write-off on your taxes
- A few extra bucks for not having to rent/buy a:
- storage shed
- an addition to your house
- a bigger house
- in a bigger house, you’d have to rent a U-Haul to haul it all from the old place to the new
- in a bigger house, you’d have to buy more stuff to fill up the spaces.
Ecclesiastes is a tremendously happy book of the Bible. If we’re profligate with God’s blessings, great joy will fill us.
How do you cast your bread on the water?
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