A wealthy man had a friend who was a good contractor but had been down on his luck. Wanting to do him a favor, the rich man hired his friend with the following stipulations: “Here is $200,000.00. Build me a new home. If you do a good job, I will pay you very well.” Excited, the contractor went to work. A $200,000.00 fund was a bountiful resource. But the more he thought about it, the more he wanted a part of the money for himself. He began to cut corners – cheap lumber, shoddy plumbing, watered-down cement, and so on. He tried to hide the poorly constructed house with a…

I’m sure that we are all familiar with the word “utopia.” Many of us may think that, if certain things were true, we might even be able to experience it.  For those who may not be familiar with either the word or the concept, dictionary.com defines “utopia” as: 1. an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc. 2. (usually lowercase) an ideal place or state. 3. (usually lowercase) any visionary system of political or social perfection. There are at least two words in that definition that are intriguing. Those words are “imaginary” and “visionary.” They indicate that one cannot point to a spot on the globe…

As I write this, Jim and I are staying in a motel while he is preaching at a Gospel Meeting. It has been a very pleasant stay so far with a spacious room and a great breakfast provided every morning (I could get used to this!). All of the staff members here have been very nice to deal with, but one lady who helps with breakfast has been very pleasant to talk to. She has told us about her children and grandchildren, about the job she has, and why she has it. She’s a very hard worker and gets extremely tired every day. The other morning, while discussing how tired she is at the…

It was one of those statements that was written in a derogatory way, but it jumped off the page at me. I was reading an autobiography, and the writer was talking about a nemesis who made what he considered to be terrible decisions. His reasoning was that the man knew all the spreadsheets and financial calculations, but he was never with the people to hear their stories and to understand how all these figures and facts worked themselves out. But the way he worded it is what made it stand out to me. The statement was this: “He knew the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.” I just…