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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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| This page last updated March 1, 2002 |