The Things That Matter

The theologian Fred Craddock used to tell a story about his friend Glenn Adsit, a missionary who had served for many years in China. Glenn and his family were eventually placed under house arrest, and one day the soldiers came and said: "You can return to America.”

The family celebrated — until the soldiers added: "You can take two hundred pounds with you.”

Two hundred pounds. After years of accumulated life. Craddock described what followed: the arguments, the weighing, the agonizing over what stays and what goes. The vase. The computer. The books. Load it up, weigh it, take something off, weigh it again. Finally — two hundred pounds exactly.

"Ready to go?" the soldiers asked.

"Yes," Glenn said.

"You weigh the kids?"

"No."

"Weigh the kids."

And in that moment, Craddock said, the vase and the books and everything else became trash. Just like that.

Most of us know, in the abstract, what matters most. But we live as though we don't — caught up in small grievances, anxious about trivial things, taking for granted the people and the gifts right in front of us.

Sometimes it takes a jolt — an illness, a loss, a sudden shift in circumstances — to remind us. The psalm invites us not to wait for the jolt. To consider, right now, what we would weep to lose. And to give thanks for it today.

Because the things we would weep to lose are almost never the vase or the books. They are the people. The ordinary moments. The unremarkable Tuesday that turns out, in retrospect, to have been a gift. We rarely recognize those moments while we are living them. But we can learn to. That is what the practice of gratitude slowly teaches us — to see the blessing before us - right here, right now.

Prayer: Gracious God, forgive us for taking our greatest blessings for granted. Today, before anything shifts or changes, we give thanks — for the people we love, for the life we have been given, for your steadfast love that carries us through. Help us to hold what matters most with open, grateful hands; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

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