By: Pastor David Grousnick

There was a man who loved gold. Then he inherited a fortune. With joy he redecorated his bedroom. He put gold parchment wallpaper up, hung yellow curtains, had a golden colored rug and a yellow bedspread. He even bought some yellow pajamas.

But then he got sick and came down with, of all things, yellow jaundice.

His wife called the doctor who made a house call and went up to that bedroom for an examination. The doctor stayed up there a long while. When he came down, the wife asked, “How is he?”

“Don’t know,” said the doctor. “I couldn’t find him.”

I heard about an expert in diamonds who happened to be seated on an airplane beside a woman with a huge diamond on her finger. Finally, the man introduced himself and said, “I couldn’t help but notice your beautiful diamond. I am an expert in precious stones. Please tell me about that stone.”

She replied, “That is the famous Klopman diamond, one of the largest in the world. But there is a strange curse that comes with it.”

Now the man was really interested. He asked “What is the curse?”

Lowering her voice, she replied, “The curse is Mr. Klopman.”

The curse of any kind of valuable possession is its capacity to steal our hearts and souls and somewhere in the process, we can easily get lost.

A seminary professor named Stanley Hauerwas had a novel idea about how churches should receive new members. A teacher of Christian ethics at Duke University,he was considered by many to be one of the world’s most influential living theologians.

He once wrote about the church’s need for honesty and he called for us to tell the truth as a “community of character.”

To this end, he had a modest proposal. Whenever people joined the church, Hauerwas thought they should stand and answer four questions:

Who is your Lord and Savior? The response: “Jesus Christ.”

Do you trust in him and seek to be his disciple? “I do.”

Will you be a faithful member of this congregation? The answer: “I will.” Finally, one last question: What is your annual income?

You heard me correctly. When people joined the church, Dr. Hauerwas thought they ought to name their Lord and Savior and tell their fellow church members how much money they made!

According to William Cater, obviously Hauerwas did not serve as a pastor of a congregation. His idea just wouldn’t work, especially in the American church.

Most church members believe salary figures are more sacred than prayer, and would quickly tell an inquisitive minister to snoop around somewhere else.

What’s more, parish experience tempers the questions a minister might ask of church members. Most pastors learn early on how to dance around the issue of money without ever naming it.

Nevertheless, the perception of our financial worth and our feelings about being successful often get so wadded up together it’s hard to keep your eye on the true prize.

More than forty years ago, John Killinger heard a man describe two paintings he said he had at his home.

One was of the figure in Jesus’ story of the rich man whose crops produced so abundantly that he decided to pull down his barns and build bigger ones, and he said to his soul, “Soul, eat, drink, and have a great time, for tomorrow you die.” The caption under this painting said: “The Failure that Looked Like Success.”

The other painting, the companion painting, was of Jesus dying on the cross, the crown of thorns on his head, his chin drooping against his chest, the crude nails in his hands, and all his friends off somewhere in hiding. The caption under this picture said: “The Success that Looked Like Failure.”

We would all like to be successful and fulfilled as persons. It is one of the dreams with which our culture surrounds us.

But when we listen to Jesus, we realize that success and fulfillment don’t really come the way we often expect them to. They aren’t the direct result of anything we can do to attain them.

Instead, they’re a gift from God and they simply happen when we are doing the right things with our lives. In God’s eyes it is a whole lot better to be a success that looks like failure than a failure that looks like success.

And, if you have bought any lottery tickets, good luck! And if you win, don’t forget your local charities!! And if you win big, don’t forget First Christian Church.

That’s OK to say, isn’t it?

David Grousnick, is the Pastor at the First Christian Church in Artesia.