Often when my husband and sons peruse old boxes of baseball cards in the storage nooks of our house, a conversation evolves about their value. Invariably, my husband makes the comment, "They're only worth what someone will pay for them." This morning in my prayer time, I enlarged that idea to encompass a box of faith, a box of sacrifice, a box of redemption. What will one person pay for it?
The price is self-awareness in its meanest state. Be a "beneficiary of God's grace" I read recently. A beneficiary generally receives something good; but a beneficiary also often pays a price...a cost, like an insurance premium over time or the loss of the loved one who left an inheritance. Rarely but in old fiction is someone the completely oblivious beneficiary to a secret fortune.
What is God's box of baseball cards worth? The stone on the balance weighs our courage, our courage to face ourselves in all our raw beauty and treachery. It's why, I think, the first thing on the laundry-list of sins that lead to the "second death" of Revelation 21 is cowardliness, followed closely by unbelief. It's why the deepest love is closer to death than it is to affection, as my pastor stated last Sunday. The deepest love costs you yourself. Jesus said, before you take up your own cross, count the cost.
God has a box of cards, with a cross on every one. Each of us offers what we can in terms of that courage of self-awareness, that is if we seek a card at all. My hope, my prayer is that through this life I've been given, I'll up the value of those cards again where it has fallen.
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