Money, money, money, money...MOney

One day an older lady came on the ship and anonymously left a box of coins for my dad. He didn’t know what they were but one of the single guys told him he’d like to have one to drill a hole in for a necklace. My dad had them looked at and discovered they were British gold sovereigns. At the time, gold was at the highest value it had ever been. The single guy wasn’t going to get his necklace.

My dad had a lot of integrity. He asked Don Stephens if he should give the coins to the ministry since he wasn’t sure of the lady’s intentions. Since no one knew who the lady was and she couldn’t be asked, Don told my dad to keep them. Never wanting anything to come between him and God, my dad took the coins, put them on the floor, stood on them, thanked God for them but told Him that He was much greater than any earthly treasure.

I wasn’t as mature as my dad. Being that I had very little money, on the rare occasions I got some, it was a big deal to me. I had got ahold of some kind of American magazines that had advertisements in the back for this and that cheap, tacky trinket and that’s where I saw the item that became my obsession.

At the time, I didn’t know the items were tacky. All I saw was something from America that I felt would rock my world. It was a watch but not just any watch. It had a bunch of cool buttons on it so you could use it as a calculator and whatever other cool features you could do with buttons, looong before cell phones and the internet. I felt that this was something that would really add a significant dimension to my small, poor, foreigner existence but… 

God doesn’t want anything in a Christian’s life to be more important to us than Him. He doesn’t do it out of spite. It’s just that He knows that when He is first, that is best for us. So when He sees things in our hearts that compete for our attention, He puts His finger on it.

They would often take up offerings on the ship for this or that need. It seemed that every time I had a little bit of money they would take up another one. Actually, they took them all the time but when I didn’t have money, I didn’t think much of it because I couldn’t participate. But when I did have money, I kept getting the conviction to give it. 

The Bible tells us that God loves a cheerful giver. It had the opposite affect on me. Because I knew that if I saved any money, I would just have to give it away, I started to spend it as soon as I got it. That way I could use it on myself instead of having to let others benefit. Obviously, I had not yet learned the truth to another Bible verse that it is far better to give than receive. So it took a while before I got my first watch.


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