Why we’re here

In the gospel reading today, Jesus tells a parable in which a rich person leaves and gives three of his servants some of his money to take care of while he’s gone.  Two of them put this money to use and make more money for him, but the other one buries it for safe keeping.  When the master gets back, he’s happy that the first two servants have done something productive with what they were given.  He’s quite unhappy (wailing and grinding of teeth unhappy) with the third one who didn’t make anything of what he was given.

As Laura and I were talking about it at dinner, we were saying how this sums up a lot of our reasons for coming down here, and we wanted to share that with you, our loyal blog reader.

We’ve been given a lot.  We both came from families that were well off.  We were able to get a good education (again, thanks families!).  I had a nice, well paying job for several years, and Laura was able to get her masters and teach a bit.  At this point in our life (about two years ago) we stopped and looked at where we were.  We could have decided that we wanted to focus on our careers or start our own family. Instead, we decided to take what we’d been given and put some of that time, talent, and treasure towards loving others, people we’d never even met.

There are lots of ways we could have done this without heading to Bolivia.  Learning the language was important to us, as was serving some who had the kind of hard life that only a developing country can give.  However, that’s just the extra stuff.  We’re glad we’ve been given (and taken) the opportunity to take what we’ve been given and use it for loving others instead of just keeping it for ourselves.  And what we have received in return, the grace of getting to know all these wonderful children and people that otherwise we never would have known, has already been overwhelming.

One thought on “Why we’re here

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>