A Lie That is True

Money makes me happy.


Really. It does. This week I held $320 in $20-bills alone. (I graduated last weekend, and apparently people get a lot of money when they graduate). Throw in all the checks and other pieces of cash in there and it was easily the most money I had ever held before. It was right there in my hand, and it was all mine. My heart was happy.


But this year God has been teaching me a valuable lesson. Money doesn't make anyone happy. Sure, I'm excited about having a little extra cash on hand. Perhaps in the near future I'll buy that guitar I've been craving. But what is that going to do for me? Then will I be content? I'd be a fool to think that. Yet somehow I'm deceived by it constantly.


Money is a strange thing. It was made for man, but man has become its slave. And when it doesn't work out too well for man, he tries to exchange that money for some other form of "satisfaction." How easily we forget truth.


(So just as a clarification here, this is where we are so far: the statement that money makes people happy is both true and false. It is true because just about anyone who is given a chunk of cash is excited about it. But it is false because that happiness does not last. So we move on to other things, like guitars and cars and such. Make sense?)


Truth is something I want to buy. Last weekend my pastor gave the commencement message for my graduation. It was from Proverbs 23:23: "Buy truth, and do not sell it, Get wisdom and instruction and understanding." This is something that will take time. It will take money of a different kind. It will take energy. And I will face every temptation imaginable along the way, but when I come to a Vanity Fair - perhaps one like Christian and Faithful did in The Pilgrim's Progress - and the sellers ask me, "What will you buy," I will respond without delay, "I buy the truth."


Because after being given hundreds of dollars in cash and checks, after getting on the Dean's List at Ivy Tech, after becoming a published poet, after four summers of work as a missionary, after two hundred and ten songs and even more poems, after high school, after jobs, after clothes - I am still unsatisfied. (In fact, I am even more distressed now). All of those are rubbish. They are dung in comparison to knowing Christ, in comparison to being known by Christ.


All I have is Christ.


All I will buy is the truth.