GRASPING FOR TREASURE

Grasping For Treasure

The frantic screams of a small child echo through the halls of a stately mansion. When the parents and servants of the estate arrive at the child’s side, they discover that his arm is hopelessly stuck inside the mouth of a $40,000 Chinese vase. Try as they might, they cannot free the boy’s hand from the vase, and ultimately decide they must break it open in order to liberate the child’s hand. 

Finally, with shattered pieces of precious china lying all around it, the reason for the boy’s dilemma became evident to all, and as his tiny little fist slowly opened, one shinny penny emerged. In his childish ambition, the boy had refused to let go of his perceived treasure while causing the destruction of the expensive artifact in the process.

Now you might be somewhat offended by what the child has done at this point. Perhaps, you're thinking, oh what a foolish child it was one of the 1943 copper-alloy pennies, of which only 40 are known to exist, and one of them just sold for 1.7 million dollars recently. The child might be forgiven for breaking the vase if this was the case!

Sometimes this process can look a bit ugly and even cruel, like the shards of a beautiful vase that has been broken, lying on the floor, but when the child is saved, (and the collector’s coin has been sold for $2 million), all is forgiven. It has been said, “If you’re gonna make an omelet, you have to break some eggs! This expression is of course another way of saying that, in order to process a raw material and make something useful and valuable out of it, you made need to sacrifice certain aspects of beauty and even innocence in order to accomplish that.

Works Cited

NKJV New King James Version. Holy Bible. Thomas Nelson. Nashville, TN: 2000. Print.

Richards, Jay. Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Harper One. Kindle Edition.