An Unwilling Offering

In October of 1997, the first Fall that I spent teaching in Monterrey, my host mother Gloria decided to buy me a birthday present. We went back and forth trying to decide whether to buy a dress or my favorite perfume. Finally, we decided on perfume. After checking the price in a costly department store, Gloria, Yoya, Gina and I went to the Pulga Rio, a large flea market, to buy the perfume. Gloria was sure it would be less expensive at the flea market; all her clients had told her so. The flea market sells a large variety of goods, from cheap shoes to silver jewelry to American products hard to find anywhere else to pirated movies to name-brand makeup to flimsy toys. You name it, the Pulga has it. We found a booth with real perfumes and colognes (I think half the products in the Pulga must be pirated), and bought a medium-sized bottle of Estee Lauder's Tuscany.

I enjoyed my perfume the entire school year. By skimping on it a little, seven months had passed, and the bottle was still more than three-quarters full. One afternoon, hurrying while dressing for the final parents' meeting of the year, I grabbed the box that held my perfume bottle. Someone told me later that you should never put perfume on in a hurry. A couple of squeezes, and I was ready to head out the door... a good thing, because I was running behind schedule, and my ride was due at any minute. I turned, poised to place the bottle back into the box. As I did this, somehow the bottle slipped from my fingers. It hit the tile floor. As if I were watching a slow motion replay, I saw the bottle bounce once, at least six inches off the floor, then CRASH! It hit again, and cracked in two, sending perfume and little bits of glass in all directions. 

With a vague idea in my mind of salvaging what I could, I ran to the kitchen to get some kind of container. All my efforts to encourage the liquid into the container were in vain. Yoya saw what had happened and said, "Why don't you get a sponge to sop up what you can? Then you can squeeze all the liquid from the sponge into the container." We found a new sponge, one of those yellow ones with a green scrubby coating on one side. I sponged up as much perfume as I could, and squeezed it into my plastic container, but the alcohol in the perfume did something to the green scrubby stuff, causing some of the coloring to mix with the perfume, and turning the once-orange liquid a muddy greenish brown. At that moment, my ride arrived, and I had to leave the fragrant, disgusting-looking mess on a table in the room.

I wanted to cry, but forced myself not to. The last thing I wanted was to arrive at the meeting with a red nose and bleary eyes. After our meeting, Yoya came in for the youth group meeting and mentioned the accident. Carlos was standing there, so I explained what had happened to him. It made me want to cry again, so when I sat down to eat, I began to tell the people at the table, Angie, Pastor Juan, and Mr. and Mrs. Ramos, what I had done. I said I knew that what had happened had a purpose, or some lesson for me to learn, but I couldn't see it at all. The only thing I had learned was never to put on perfume in a hurry. 

Angie mentioned that she had learned that even unexplained losses have some purpose, although we may not see it at once. She reminded me of the time in the Old Testament when Amaziah the king of Judah hired one hundred thousand soldiers from Israel to go with his army into battle. God sent a prophet to tell the king to dismiss the hired soldiers, because God was not with them. When King Amaziah protested that he had already paid the men, and asked what he would do about the loss, God replied, "The Lord is able to give thee much more than this." (2 Chronicles 25:5-11)

Pastor Juan reminded me of Mary's beautiful offering: anointing Jesus' feet with costly perfume. I shook my head and said that it wasn't quite the same. Mary intended her offering, but I would never have broken the perfume bottle on purpose. Pastor Juan's smile spread under his heavy dark moustache as he launched into a story about a friend of his. Several years ago, the government had minted some special commemorative coins. They were five peso pieces, but were worth twenty-five pesos. This friend of Pastor Juan's was in a worship service, and when the offering was taken up, he fished a five peso piece out of his pocket and threw it in. Later, he missed his commemorative coin, and realized that he'd mistaken it for a regular coin. He said, "I gave twenty-five pesos, but God only counted it to me for five pesos, because I only meant to give five pesos." This story seemed to fit what had happened to me. 

I thought about it later. The last thing on my mind when I dropped the bottle was an offering to my Lord. Yet, the perfume was spilled. Could nothing more could be done about it? Would the Lord accept such an unwilling offering? I compared my loss to Mary's gift. Undoubtedly she had given to the Lord her most valuable possession, one that may have, at an earlier time, been intended as her dowry. Moved by a gratitude many of us have never known, Mary washed Jesus feet with tears, dried them with her hair, kissed them, and willingly poured over His feet a costly ointment. My own loss seemed trifling in comparison, but it had hurt. Could this be offered to the Lord? 

I thought about that. An unwilling offering, in a way, but planned by God. The perfume had been given me; it wasn't even anything that I had really earned. But that's the nature of an offering. We can't give anything that hasn't been given to us. I could do nothing better with the situation than give it to the Lord, with the recognition that I would not have done it of my own accord, but that it was an offering God had chosen. Every one of us has had those situations... we're in a place we wouldn't choose, but we can turn it into an offering to the Lord. Will He accept such offerings? 
I think so.

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