You land in a different country. It’s early in the morning after a night flight and your energy is low, your mind is foggy and now you have to navigate the cheery people at the customs and immigration checkpoints of this new nation – which is completely foreign to you. You don’t know the language, the customs, or the monetary currency. You go to the exchange booth and get some local money and your brain starts computing the rate of exchange.
As if that’s not enough, pretty soon you are in the shopping area looking at things you’d like to buy and extremely distracted by the valuation process of determining if it’s really worth it. But in order to decide that, you have to convert the price into terms you understand and quite rapidly you get to a point where you are exasperated and feel overwhelmed. “Why can’t we just have a common currency!?”
Interesting question. In fact for those on the way of holiness, there is a common currency. Not in the economic terms of the world – possessions, power, status, influence. Rather, God has provided a common currency for the economy of the Kingdom where the human heart seeks meaning, value, and fulfillment. That currency is love, and it was manifested visibly in the person of Jesus Christ.
When you decide to follow Christ and allow Him to increasingly form your life, you are investing more and more in the economy of God’s Kingdom and you begin using His currency – love. This is not a trite, sentimental disposition but a deep commitment of the will to be altered at a fundamental level in seeing others as God sees them.
This is the reawakening of the image of God imprinted upon every human. It is kindled afresh to the life-source in which it was first created. Through layers of insensitivity and selfishness, the currency of love enlivens the nature that has gone cold and dead in the wearying scramble to navigate an economy that is always changing, always elusive; always just beyond the greedy reach of success.
Value in this economy is of a different nature – a lasting, fulfilling, and holistic nature. And the currency is common. Love!
Earn a lot, and invest it well,
Kevin