The Parable of the Rich Fool
13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” 15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21 “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
A couple of years back I came across articles about how bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists among Olympic winners. Because I am an academic, here's a link to one of those articles - Why Bronze Medalists are Happier than Silver Winners - in which you'll learn, in a nutshell, that silver winners are grumpy because they almost won the gold and so focus on their loss whereas bronze medalists are happy because they almost didn't win a medal at all and so focus on their win.
What does this have to do with rich fools and...well...me? In earnings, I am a silver medalist and that has made me a rich fool. After years of starving artistry, lay ministry, and graduate school - time where I was well acquainted with social services and knew my way around Food Stamps - I hit middle class status. Being middle class and a single mother worked to form a perfect storm of anxiety - I had to save - I had to save for retirement (that's what middle class people did), I had to save for my daughter's college (middle class kids went to college), I had to have enough to be able to say - like the rich fool, "You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."
Then, the other day I was innocently listening to NPR and a speaker mentioned casually that you need to squirrel away at least a million dollars to retire these days. Google "a million dollars to retire" and you'll find out that it wasn't one speaker's dementia kicking in - that's the figure, although some hits on that Google search even ask the million dollar question, "Is a million dollars enough?"
Now, I've been good trying to save for college and for retirement - so good it made me crazy anxious - but that statement took me back to my late teens and my first semester in college. I had to take P.E. classes - part of the whole Gen Ed package - and the first day we were asked to jog around the field. Huffing, puffing, and sure I was going to die, I made it. I was so proud of myself. I could do this - this class would be a breeze! But no. The very next class we were asked to up it to four laps (a cool mile rather than a cool million). There was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY I'd be able to do that - I walked one lap, never jogged again in that class, and took my C like a champ. The idea that I'd need a million bucks to happily retire (and I assume they weren't talking retiring to a castle on the coast of France with weekends in the Riviera either) - hit me like the request that I run four laps. It ain't never going to happen.
At that moment, I left my rich foolishness behind. I will follow Jesus' advice and live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself (Matthew 6:25-34), which coincidentally, is also the advice from one of my favorite songs by the Grassroots:
Enjoy!
LOVE THIS!!
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