The Stamp Collection
Recently, my youngest daughter conjured up one of her inimitable ingenuities. She had been talking with her closest friend about the latter’s hobby of stamp collecting. Without blinking an eyelid she agreed with her that they should meet and do some stamp exchanging. No problem, so far, you may say. Fair enough. The only snag is that my daughter has no stamp collection!
So, what does she do? She goes into my study, picks up my stamp collection and off she goes with the stamp album under her arm to her friend’s house. Once there she happily spends over two hours trading stamps quite oblivious of what was actually involved!
Once back home her “achievement” quickly came to light. In fact she was quite boastful of her successful trading! Not without a certain degree of anxiety, I quietly opened the album, and to my dismay started evaluating the result of her entrepreneurship. In place of some of my most treasured items I found that a wide variety of the most colourful stamps from all over Africa, South America and Asia... naturally quite worthless contemporary stamps. However, to my daughter’s reasoning (very logical I dare say) they were certainly no match to my “old”, dull single-coloured Queen Victoria stamps.
Unbelievably, I kept my calm, although she did get a telling-off. However, I couldn’t help realising that a tremendous change had taken place in the way I was viewing the situation as compared to forgone days.
At this point, what was important to me was the lesson I could learn from this experience.
More or less, in our lives we reason things out in the same way that my daughter did. We tend to go for anything that “glitters” and shove aside all the “dull” circumstances or events. In this way we are continually discarding very important moments in our lives, which in reality are real gems directly, donated to us by God our Father.
For example, would you rather choose a day spend sick in bed rather than a day on an outing? Of course not. This does not mean that there’s anything wrong with the outing, but there is probably a great treasure hidden in that unattractive day when you were ill. And so it is with many, many other situations.
But we need to reflect a lot on each and every circumstance that befalls us. In this way we will come to appreciate more, be thankful for each moment of our lives.
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