Skip to main content

A Wasteful Saver

  Hetty Green had money problems.


  She would wear the same black dress till it was worn out. Her daughter was sent to a convent to be raised and provided by nuns and her son lost his leg because of the cost of treating an infection. She separated from her husband because he spent too much and he eventually died bankrupt. She ate cold oatmeal, onions, and eggs since she hadn’t paid for fuel to heat it. She sold newspapers she had read to others for half price for extra cash. She used a ragtag trunk as a desk and set on the floor rather than have proper office furniture.

  You may be tempted to feel sorry for a woman so broke, but don’t. She wasn’t broke. Heddy Green was the daughter of a shipping magnate that had inherited 10 million dollars. When she died in 1916, she had over 100 million dollars. She had money, she just didn’t ever use it.

  Maybe we should feel sorry for her to have such a warped perceptive on what money was good for.

  We may not have that much money but I bet we may have some of the same skewed viewpoints.  Churches sometimes get so caught up on having money that they forget it is a tool we are to use to grow the kingdom.  In our desire to not be wasteful, we do nothing. As Christians, we give only to maintain not to grow.  We would rather be ‘well off’ in an earthy bank than a heavenly one.

 

"Therefore if you have not been faithful in the use of unrighteous wealth, who will entrust the true riches to you?

Luke 16:11 

 

  You can waste money without ever spending it if we don’t use it to do good and further the kingdom of God.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
Post a Comment
Read more

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

  Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair   It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission.  It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...
Post a Comment
Read more