It easily piles up. Things that you haven’t looked at, or even thought of, for years and years and years gathering dust somewhere in the depths of your closet or attic or basement. It is stuff that someone else will have to examine and then be the one to decide its fate. It might be tossed into a heap in the middle of the driveway to be hauled away a few days later by the trash company. Then again, it might bring about a moment of deep emotional remembering and be placed in a place of honor in that person’s home. Who can say?
I realized that the treasure of a life can never be measured by things. You hear that all the time. It is cliché. Yet, in that brief moment, it hit me full force deep within my heart. The words of Jesus came quickly into my mind. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven …” Yes. We can box and bag and toss, but we cannot see all the treasures stored up in heaven. Those are measured in lives, in children, in grand children. It is the treasure of a smile that passed quickly, but it meant the entire world to a person who as sorrowing and for a brief moment they were give reason to smile. The treasures of heaven can be a hug, a look, a note of encouragement, or physical labor lending a helping hand. These things cannot be put on a shelf or stored in a box. These things are what the measure of a life is-so much more than the “junk” we were sifting through.
The rest of that verse says to store up treasures in heaven where thieves cannot steal and rust and moths cannot destroy. So much of what we were looking at had had its day LONG ago. It was decaying, no longer good for anything. It was, at one time, a useful object, but rust and other processes made it nothing but stored trash-something for someone else to finally throw away. Love, grace, compassion, encouragement, forgiveness are all treasures that cannot be stored and listed and viewed. They are the treasures of heaven, deposited in a way that our Savior knows about. He will remember every kind word spoken, every sacrifice made on behalf of another. He knows when we put someone else’s needs ahead of our own. He sees it all. It is like a deposit we have made in Heaven’s First Bank of Paradise. We don’t get a pass book to see all our deposits, but God knows them all! He alone knows the true measure of a life.
Yes.
