By Jamie Snyder
Glenn Adsit ministered mostly in China. He was under house arrest in China when the soldiers came one day and said, “You can return to America.” He and his wife and two children started celebrating, and the soldiers said, “You can take two hundred pounds with you.” Well, they’d been there for years. Two hundred pounds. They got the scales and started the family arguments: Must have this vase. Well, this is a new typewriter. What about my books? What about my games? And everyone had an opinion. Everyone had their selfish item; “I can’t live without this” was heard more than once. And they weighed everything and took one thing off and weighed it again and took a few more things off. They argued and they fought; everybody had their own thing they wanted. There were lots of different opinions on what should be included and what didn’t matter. They argued over the smallest things, because two hundred pounds isn’t that much and, finally, though they didn’t all agree, they had it right on the dot, two hundred pounds.
The soldier came back and asked, “Ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“Did you weigh everything?”
“Yes.”
“You weighed the kids?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Weigh the kids.”
And in a moment, everyone agreed; the typewriter and the vase weren’t even worth discussing.
Sometimes having the right perspective changes everything.
© 2014 Jamie Snyder. Thou Shall: Freedom to Strip Away the “Nots” and Discover What God Really Wants is published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.
Jamie Snyder is lead pastor of Lakeside Christian Church where he preaches and teaches to thousands on a weekly basis. Thought he has many titles — husband, father, preacher, writer, bookworm, table-tennis player extraordinaire — the most significant one, by far, is Child of God. He resides with his wife and three children in Kentucky.
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