Everything I Need to Know I Learned...

You have seen the options that complete the sentence above: …in kindergarten, from fishing, from a jigsaw puzzle, etc. I want to add my own twist on this

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from a hundred dollar bill.

Actually, I walked right by it on Friday afternoon. You would think being in Orlando, Florida that someone would have taken more care of their one hundred dollar bill.

But I learned something about life that one brief encounter on the sidewalk. When my eyes saw the bill I was enticed (actually physically jerked) to stoop down and pick it up. After all, being at the mall and finding a one hundred dollar bill…who could ask for more! In a brief flash I felt greed and covetousness surge through my veins. It was all about claiming the bill for myself. After all, finders keepers, losers weepers! Right?

Hold on! Wait! Something was wrong. Upon closer inspection I noticed the color was wrong. The green was too dark. It looked pretty good otherwise. Guess what…it was a counterfeit, a poorly made one at that. It was hard to tell how it was made or reproduced. But there it was…a counterfeit reject lying on the sidewalk fooling no one but me for about five seconds.

In those five seconds I learned more about myself than I had known in a long time. What if it had been real? What would I have done with it?

The covetous, greedy corners of the human heart are exposed in a flash of a moment. Everything I needed to know about myself I learned from a one hundred dollar bill. I learned that I am too materialistic. I learned that I think about my good fortune at the expense of others too much. I learned that the world is too much with me.

Authenticity…needed not just for the one hundred dollar bill to be properly spent, but more importantly for my heart to stay focused on the will of God. A counterfeit bill has an uncanny way of exposing a counterfeit heart! God help each of us to be authentic in our daily walk with the Lord so that something as simple as a one hundred dollar bill (counterfeit, mind you!) will not undo us and render us a fake!

In Christian love, Curtis