For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. – Ecclesiastes 2:21

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 11, 2013): Ecclesiastes 2

In 2006, the Oprah Winfrey show told the story of a film director that gave a homeless man $100,000. The money came in a briefcase that had been planted in a garbage bin for him to find. And when he found it, he was speechless – he quite literally did not know what to do. The film director offered to put the man in contact with a financial planner, but the offer was refused. And the film team had a chance to watch what this homeless man would do with his new found wealth.

The first thing the man did was that he went and bought a truck for himself, and then he purchased cars for his friends. And in an incredibly short time he had spent all of the money and was back living on the street again. The study has raised a question about how much good giving money to someone actually does. The reality is that too often given money actually seems to hurt the person. We actually begin to create a dependent relationship with them, rather than allowing them to become independent and healthy. It was never our intention to hurt, but that does not change the reality.

And the Teacher draws us to exactly that point. We work and toil and save and we have acquired an amount of wealth. And we know what it is that we want to do with that wealth, but someday when we leave that wealth to someone else – and there is no guarantee what it is that they will do with our wealth. There is also no guarantee that the money will even be a benefit to them. And in some cases that money can be the source of great misfortune.

Money has the ability to transform, but that transformation is not always for the positive. The list of people who have been winners of lotteries and have lost all of the money that they had won continues to grow. And there is this sense that somehow winning the lottery has robbed them of all of their hope for the future. They had achieved the dream, but in a short time the dream has crashed and left them tight back where they started – and that can be an even worse place to be in when we realize that the same place is a place without hope. What had the possibility to make a difference had been wasted – and often because we just do not understand money that has been given to us because there is no memory of all of the things that we had to do and the things that we did without to get the money.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ecclesiastes 3