Nineteen sixty-one.  It was a year of change for my family.  Most wouldn’t have thought the changes all that beneficial.

We weren’t living in luxury.  Dad had intended to support his family with a career in the U.S. Navy.  For thirteen years, he had done just fine, advancing to the rank of a Petty Officer Radioman.  Then one day in 1961, he was out, purportedly with a chronic illness from which he had never suffered.

Returning to the Rio Grande Valley, where he had been stationed for a time, Dad, along with his red-headed wife and five children ranging from ten down to four years old, were living in their small mobile home parked in an orange grove, thanks to the kindness of the old farmer who owned it.  The erstwhile radioman became a ditch digger with the local natural gas supplier.

You can imagine that the five urchins living in that little mobile home understood rather rapidly what it was like to survive on a tight budget.  I don’t remember hearing much complaining, but it’s never easy to cut back on extras, especially for a 4-year-old who already had a sweet tooth, loving Butternut candy bars and Dr. Pepper.

One day, all the little waifs were delighted to receive a surprise gift from our grandfather.  The old man (he was never anything but old to me) was in no way blessed with a surplus of luxuries in his own life, but he knew his grandchildren would enjoy the shiny silver coins he shared.  Each child got a coin of their very own.

What a treasure!  The Liberty silver dollars, minted forty years before in the follow-up to the Great War (commonly known to us now as World War I), featured the head of Lady Liberty on one side and a victorious eagle on the reverse, clutching an olive branch in its claw.

The little stair-step ragamuffins gathered around our parents, silver dollars clutched in dirty hands, begging to go to the grocery store immediately.  Can you blame us?

A dollar!  One hundred pennies!

Images of bubble gum (with Bazooka Joe comics wrapped around them!) and candy bars, along with a toy whistle or a rubber ball, flew through my tiny brain like wealth so vast, it couldn’t be grasped.  A dollar to this tiny, poor tyke was luxury beyond his dreams.

We went to town.  But not to the grocery store.  Not at first anyway.

All stuffed into the 1957 Ford station wagon, we sat and waited for Dad at the bank.  It wasn’t clear why our patience needed to be tried by such a delay, but it just gave us more time to jabber to each other about what we would buy at the HEB store down the highway.

Before we knew it, here came Dad with a small stack of dollar bills in his hand.  A crisp, new one-dollar bill for each of the siblings.  Even this little chubby four-year-old got one.

“Now, you can spend your dollars at the grocery store,” Dad said, taking the shiny silver coins from each of us in turn.

We thought it was a strange thing to do.  A dollar is a dollar, isn’t it?  But it didn’t matter to us.  We were on our way to heaven-on-earth!

Over the years, we would catch sight of the silver dollars in the little box in Dad’s closet.  Each time, one of us would exclaim, “Oh!  There are our silver dollars from Grandpa!”

And Dad would quietly reply, “No. These are my silver dollars from Grandpa.  I bought them from you.”

It took me a lot of years to understand what had happened back when my siblings and I sold our grandfather’s precious gifts to us.

Like Esau with his birthright, we happily sold our gifts from Grandpa to assuage the temporary desires that drove us.  And, like Esau, the desire returned again and again.  The birthright never did.

Gone.  Squandered like water onto sand.

Fortunately, for the siblings in this story, that wasn’t the case.  A wise father, as he approached the end of his lifetime, came for a visit with us.

He had a box with him.  And, reaching into that box, he brought out silver dollar after silver dollar, one of which he handed to each of the siblings who were present.

“They were a gift from your grandfather.  Now, they’re a gift from me.”

It was always his plan.  For over forty years, he kept them.  To give to us.

In our naivety, childish and undisciplined, we only saw the monetary value of the gift.  He knew the gift was worth much more than that.  He knew we would come to understand that some day.

As my mind turns over the story (I’ve had a lot of years to think about it, you know), I begin to wonder if we ever outgrow our naivety.  Or our childishness.

So much wealth, we are surrounded by.  So much.

And we miss it.  Snatching at the useless, temporal pleasures of this world, we cannot see the great treasure we’ve been given.  Gifts from above, sent from a loving Father.

One of my poet friends wrote the words recently.  Her words arrested me.  I mean that.  Stopped me in my tracks.  They are still shocking.

I hope she won’t mind me sharing a few of them here:

“I live in luxury of holy things
They are the sweet possessions of my soul.
My life is filled with all His Spirit brings.”
(from Luxury, by April Petz)

Luxury of holy things!

We are surrounded by them, covered by them, and undergirded with them.  Not just enough, but a surfeit of gifts from our Creator.

It’s not my intention to make a list of these holy things.  I’d never be able to enumerate them.  Besides, there are books and articles written by many others more well-equipped to describe them.

I will say that there are more things on the list of holy things than ever those writings could contain. And, it doesn’t hurt to let our minds run freely over them frequently.

James says that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights. (James 1:17)

Every one of them.

Perhaps it’s time to look for them ourselves.

I’m not going to tell you my silver dollar is one of the holy things.  But it symbolizes one of them to me.

Every time I look at it—even if it’s only to see it in my mind’s eye and turn it over in my thoughts once again—I consider the holy gift of the love of a family; Love passed down from an old man to his grandchildren; Love from a father who helped his children to understand the importance of treasuring the gift.

Oh!  Do you know what the numismatists (that’s a coin collector to you and me) call that silver dollar?

It’s the Peace Dollar,  designed with a message of peace to a war-weary world after the horrible carnage of the Great War, one many hoped would be the war that brought an end to all wars.  The word is inscribed right down at the victorious eagle’s feet on the reverse side of the coin.

World peace wasn’t to be.  Peace doesn’t come at the bidding of politicians and economic manipulations of the supply of coins.

It’s a luxury, given by a loving Heavenly Father to His children.

If only we treasured it as much as He does.

Peace.

What a luxurious gift!

Another one of His invaluable holy things.  A gift to us in the chaos and the strife, in the terror and the agonizing pain.

And, it’s ours—a gift from the heart of our Loving Father.

And somehow, I know, His holy things are made more holy as they are shared with others.

And the more we give them away, the wealthier we become in holy things.

Peace.  Hope.  Joy.  Love.  Grace.  Mercy.  I start the list again in my mind, but am overwhelmed by the wealth.

How rich we are in the only things that matter.

But, I’d still take a Butternut candy bar, too.

 

 

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.“
(John 14:27, KJV)

“Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”
(Erich Fromm)

 

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