storing up
Spend some time today reflecting on your priorities. Do they accurately reflect your values? Are your actions in alignment with your values and priorities?
Luke 12: 20-21
But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
There is a translation of verse 21 that says “that’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God”. Ouch.
As one who likes to plan and prepare, and who is currently walking through a season of helping my parents make plans for what will happen to their “barn” when they are no longer here, this passage challenges me and makes me take pause. How often does life get filled with Self instead of God? How often are our egos, our fears, our wants, our desires, put at a place of priority over a life lived marked by considerate generosity? And what are we storing up…things? Money? A false sense of security and power?
What if we, instead, stored up memories, stories? What if we passed down lineages of stories and generations of traditions that could be shared long after we have departed this world?
And for those of us left to sort out the barns of the generation before us, what will we share, what will we store, and what will we miss most of the relationships and people that are now absent from our lives?
Spend some time today reflecting on your priorities. Do they accurately reflect your values? Are your actions in alignment with your values and priorities?
—Pepa Paniagua