All Are Yours

“…all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”
1 Co 3:23

This is a very simple logic, isn’t it? We are of Christ, and Christ is of God, therefore we are of God. In the same way, what God possesses belongs to Christ, and what Christ possesses belongs to us, therefore what God possesses belongs to us as well. Being children of God, we do have free access to all things since they are our Heavenly Father’s possessions.

To many of us, this idea is probably in theory only, not in practice. We may be rich, but don’t really know how to access our wealth, therefore we all lead our lives as paupers.

Whether we are rich or not has a lot to do with our capacity of enjoying the good things in life and has very little to do with the number of our possessions we happen to own. If we lose our appetite for food, all the delicacies from the peak of the mountain or the depth of the sea (山珍海味) will not make our mouth water at all. In this aspect, the rich ones are the poor people with a big appetite for food, not the wealthy who have lost their craving for delicacies. Good food certainly can be purchased with money, but the appreciation and enjoyment of it is a gift from God, which cannot be bought.

We seem to have devoted a lot of our time and energy trying to earn more money so that we can buy whatever can be purchased, neglecting to take time to smell the roses, which is absolutely free, or lose sight of the beauty of nature that changes daily yet remains constant. We may get to the point when we are able to afford buying paintings by famous artists, but have absolutely no appreciation for the art works done by the greatest Artist in the entire universe.

We are what we perceive ourselves to be, and being rich or poor is in fact a matter of perception. We can all become enormously wealthy by cultivating the way of seeing and the ability of appreciation. The simple truth is that we don’t have to possess to enjoy. Of course we do have to possess a fast car in order to taste its speed and excitement, but if I venture to guess, the joy of walking in the woods sure beats speeding down the autobahn any day.

Sweets ruin our appetite for a regular meal, yet we continue to dig into them as if they were the solid food that we need to sustain our lives. Sweets turn into junk if we have too much of them. They don’t make us strong, they make us fat, and we are well aware that the obese are not necessarily rich. In our passionate pursuit of wealth, I am afraid we may have all become obese spiritually and physically and have lost the capacity for true happiness. We devour the dessert as if it were the main course and lose the desire for what’s good and wholesome for our body and soul.

Most people can afford buying a ticket to view the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, but only a few of them can possess it by appreciating the Canyon for what it is. It may take years to hone the skill, but it’s well worth the effort, for they are the wealthy few who can take the Canyon home after they witness the natural wonder. We don’t have to be Bill Gates to own the Grand Canyon.