Perspective

"I suppose in affluent societies such as we live in,
and all of the things God's blessed us with,
it's easy to be a collector. I've always had
a lot of treasure hunter in me, it's in my blood,
and I suspect that many of you have a little
bit of treasure hunter in you as well. Well, forty
years ago, my father, two brothers and I used to
spend a great deal of time digging in old
dumps looking for antique bottles. And if you
had asked me at that time what my treasure
was or where it was, I would've told you it was
an old bottle. Even though we never found
anything extremely valuable, it was something
that we did as a family. Now forty years later,
looking back, my dad is gone, my brothers
have their own lives to live, the dumps are
pretty much gone - either off limits or all dug,
and I look back and I treasure the memory of
those times together. You see, to me, God has
shown me something different about that situation
that I never realized existed at the time! The real
value in all of that was what I was doing with
my family, it wasn't even in the artifacts. And so
God has shown me that loved ones, and memories,
and things that we do, and experiences that He
gives us are indeed more valuable than most of
the stuff we tend to collect. "