Grains of Sand

AppEngine Development (Google Images) The red light flashed on and off in my mind. “ Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? ” (Luke 16:10, 11) The context is how we handle our worldly possessions and whether we possess them or they possess us. The bottom line is given to us in verses 13: “ You cannot serve both God and money. ” But what intrigued me this morning was that little phrase from verse 11: “ ...if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches .” Call me stupid, but I never noticed before what this verse was eluding to. I always thought that Jesus was saying that if we handled a little bit of money well, He’d give us more. The context is money, after all. And money is something our minds turn to all too frequently becaus...

Genesis 37-39 This is a riches to rags story. Joseph, the favoured son of privilege, ends up as a slave. Hated and betrayed by his brothers, he loses everything he had: home, family, security, inheritance. In the house of his first master, Potiphar, the Lord blesses him. But that rank and a new kind of privilege as a trusted servant in the household are not his for long. That too is stolen from him by a slighted woman. Joseph loses everything again and ends up in jail for a crime he did not commit. He goes about his assigned work and gains the trust of the keeper of the jail. If it can be said that one can be privileged in prison, Joseph is that one. “ The Lord was with him ” (Genesis 39:2, 21). Some might say that the Lord had abandoned Joseph. I wonder if Joseph clung to the dreams he had had as a young man back in his father’s house (Genesis 37:5-9)? The promise of God that one day everything would turn out as God wanted it might have been the only thing Joseph could keep that no on...