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Article Archive |
2007
Eureka!
by Jim Morris
The story of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn played through my mind as I watched my two cousins searching for hidden treasure. Both were barefoot, wearing shorts made from worn out old jeans and no shirts. Each summer my folks took a trip to Arkansas to visit with my mom’s family for a week. I always got the chance to go on adventures with my cousins. One year my folks left me to stay in Arkansas for the entire summer! I finally got the chance to live like my cousins and it was fun.
My cousins were poor. Their dad worked as a welder but could not make enough money to keep the utilities on sometimes. When the electricity went out that summer it was time for a feast because the food would go bad without power for the refrigerator. However, my aunt never grew bitter but kept reassuring us that everything would be alright. My cousins and I, though, decided to find “treasure” to help the family pay the bills.
We searched for coke bottles, buried coins, and anything of value to redeem for cash. We pulled a little wagon to load our loot and we did pretty good. The first day we found over a dollar’s worth of bottles! We took it to my aunt and she smiled and thanked us.
The next few days we could not find many bottles. I think we only had 25 cents. We could not find anything else of value. We talked about stories of hidden treasure. If we could just find the treasure then our problems would be over.
Then we found it! Eureka!
Out of one of the trash bins waiting to be burned was something that looked like gold. We started to extract it out of the trash when one of my cousins said that it was Mr. Jones’ stuff and we better ask him first. We went to his house and asked him if we could buy some of his trash out of the heap. He said that we could and we gave him all our money–all 25 cents.
In his trash was a bunch of junk. What caught our eye was not gold but “copper.” It was yards of crimped and crushed copper tubing that had been ripped out from old plumbing. With joy we loaded up our little wagon and took it to the junk dealer who gave us over 12 dollars for the stuff! We had more than enough to help get the electricity back on at home!
Have you been waiting for a once-in-a-lifetime treasure find where all of your problems would be over? Open your eyes. See the glimmer of gold? His name is Jesus. His kingdom is true treasure.
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field” (Matthew 13:44).
07-11-07
# 28
