Today’s passage is Proverbs 11:16-31. Solomon continues to set up a series of contrasts between the righteous and the wicked. The righteous are those who are kind, generous, discrete, and refreshing to others. They don’t trust in their riches as the wicked do or withhold what they have. They don’t bring their families to ruin. Their fruit is a tree of life.
Do I give freely of what I have, my time, my energy, my love, my forgiveness, my resources?
Do I strive to refresh others or seek my own rest?
Do I trust in riches?
I once had a reasonable pension fund of over half a million dollars.
It was growing nicely towards the key number of a million dollars at which time I could retire.
I trusted in my riches for my security of life. Even though I believed in God, in my salvation through Jesus, I was more attached to the world than I was to my soul and God’s kingdom. I was out of balance.
I didn’t live what was eternally important because I didn’t understand where my focus needed to be for myself and my family.
Then came a series of financial collapses in America where most of my pension fund was invested.
I lost almost all of it. I had inherited the wind, not earthly security.
This huge loss was followed by other losses. I completely lost my spiritual bearings by committing adultery.
My first wife died. My daughter ran away without finishing college.
My lover wouldn’t marry me and I lost my job.
Our child is growing up without a father in her house.
I brought ruin on my family.
I subsisted on the pittance that my government gave to me for having been employed and paid taxes in the past.
I lived in the YMCA.
I looked longingly at what was left in my pension fund, increasingly desperate to get it and run away to some poor country where I could eek out the pathetic existence of an indigent ex-pat.
I lived a sinful life of self-pity, bragging about my former greatness as a teacher to anyone who would listen, lost in my prideful refusal to accept that my situation was the result of every decision I had made in my life.
When I reached the age when I could access the shattered remains of my pension fund, I ran into inexplicable government roadblocks.
I was still trusting in my riches, as diluted as they had become, and God was protecting me from that money until I learned to see myself with a lot more objectivity than I was, until I learned that I was the victimizer, not the victim.
When I did reach that point, I wrote a letter of repentance to my government and my pension was released.
In recognition of God’s grace in my life--my Christian wife, Wooridle Church, gainful employment--I gave most of the money to Wooridle to help build Pangyo.
The rest I gave to my children to help them rather than ruin them as I had in the past.
I needed to learn that I was trusting the wrong riches in my life and that I was not living a life of generosity, kindness, or refreshment of others. My original pension fund was a gold ring in a pig’s snout.
God and the Worridle community have taught me to seek forgiveness.
I have done that in this trip to Canada to visit my family.
I trust that a tree of life is growing the fruit of love through forgiveness in my family.
Application: to call my daughter Tess in America and ask her forgiveness.
Lord, let me seek your path of righteousness and your kingdom. Let me continue to learn the lessons of Jacob’s sons, to ask for forgiveness and give it with sincerity and gratitude.
