A school teacher is beckoned over
to a desk where a student has lashed out at a fellow student for ‘taking
things’. The teacher is tempted to chastise the student who lashed out, but has
the presence of mind to investigate the matter further. He finds out that the
one gel pen that this student has was borrowed by the student with whom he
lashed out. It turns out that the student who borrowed the gel pen has a
thirty-pack of her own.
Things are often not what they seem
on the surface.
Having taken the student aside who
had lashed out, a child not normally given to losses of emotional control,
there seemed a preoccupation with gel pens. The student asked how much a
thirty-pack would cost. The teacher estimated them to be no more than $10. The
student says, “Well, that’s not much, but my parents don’t have much money at
the moment.”
As the teacher reflected, he thanked
God for the biblical insight of Nathan’s parable of David’s hypocrisy and
harshness — to take what was not his, when he already had so much, from a man
that had nothing else:
The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the
other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had
bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his
food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to
him.
“Now a traveler came to the rich
man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to
prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and
prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
David burned with anger against the man and said to
Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who
did this must die! He must pay for
that lamb four times over, because he
did such a thing and had no pity.”
Then Nathan said to David, “You are
the man! This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over
Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel
and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even
more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite
with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.”
— 2 Samuel 12:1-9 (NIV)
Talking with the aggrieved student
it was clear that the one gel pen he did have was very precious to him; it was
a cherished resource. The student who had taken his one and only gel pen
without bothering to ask did not value his one pen; she had thirty of her own,
so what did one from someone else
matter? She treated that one gel pen as one of the thirty without regarding it
as unique as its owner did.
The rich must learn one thing when
it comes to using the resources of the poor: they must value the few resources
preciously, which is very hard for a rich person, because having little is not
something with which they can readily relate.
Anyone with a lot of anything ought
to be careful not to exploit the resources of someone with next to nothing.
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