Without Money...

 Yesterday, I left the apartment to go do a few errands and was about to hop into my car when I realized I did not have my wallet with me. I’ve been doing that often lately. I’ve grown used to it and, when it happens, I simply talk to myself gently as one would do to a frustrated child to calm him down. This time, I said, “You’re not going to go very far without money.”

Heading back to the apartment to fetch the delinquent wallet, the “without money” was still on my mind and I wondered why. I realized that it brought up the memory of a passage in Isaiah:

"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” Isaiah 55,1

In the Scriptures, we hear God constantly inviting us to come to him, even if we are sinful, even if we have nothing to offer.

“Without money and without cost...” It is easy to feel as if we need to buy our way into a relationship with God. If I am good.… if I pray... if I do this... if I avoid doing that. In the world, we need to prove ourselves, we need to have something to bargain with, we need to be worth something, if we wish to be considered a somebody.

 God does things differently. He says: You have nothing to give me? Good! Come anyway. What you lack I will give you. You are weak? Good! Come, I will give you strength. You know you are a sinner? Good! Come, I will give you a new heart. You have nothing? Good! Come, I will fill you with treasures beyond your wildest dreams. You are a nobody? Good! Come, I will make you my daughter, my son - and then you will know who you are and how precious you are.

This may sound too easy. It seems I have nothing to do. God does everything. In a way that is true. But I also need to let God be God in my life. The problem lies there: I find that very difficult to do.

A glass full of nickels (a few years ago I would have written pennies!) leaves no space for anything else. If I am thirsty and want to drink, I will have to empty the glass first to make space for the water that can parch my thirst. If, because I feel a void inside of me, I fill my life with work, or busyness, or power, or pleasure, or distractions, or... Instead of the nickels in a glass, visualize anything that people use to attempt to camouflage the hurt, the emptiness, the loneliness, the fear, and the restlessness that they feel.

It is only when I accept to let go of my security blankets that I am open to let God fill me. What God wants to give me costs absolutely nothing, but it is not cheap. It requires that I be willing to empty myself of anything that might prevent me from receiving what God wants to give me. God only fills me in as much as I have space in my life to receive what he gives.