The Great Exchange

After several decades of calling San Diego home, my friend prayerfully concluded it was time to move. Already established in her new Georgia zip code, she had returned to clean out the remaining belongings in her recently sold house. With furniture in every room, paintings on every wall, cupboards, and closets neatly filled with typical inventory, and stuff stored from under sinks, to bins suspended in the garage rafters, any help was greatly appreciated.

It was determined to assort the items into four categories: keep, sell, give away, or trash. Sometimes that decision was not easily made. There were moments when my eyes by chance would land on her, and it seemed I could read her struggling thoughts. It would not be unusual for her to suddenly break her own silence to tell me a story about the thing that was in her hands. Memories and sentiment rose to the surface and even the sound of her voice would turn tender with the recollections. Then back to the routine of the process of elimination and that was just sort of how the day would unfold.

Everything I touched would require her to decide on these possessions’ destination. So where she was, I would be also. It was in the garage going through the bins from the rafters where I came across a most significant find; a filled bag of what appeared to be gold-plated trophies of women holding rackets in their hands and engraved wall plaques with her name, date, and particular achievement. “What’s all this?” I asked with impressed enthusiasm. I was eager to hear the stories of how it was she came to earn all of them. But she dismissed the bag and its contents with no more than a handful of mumbling words that tumbled from the side of her mouth. “They used to mean something to me but not anymore. Just trash ‘em.” And that was that.

Before I cinched up the bag I gave one last gaze and thought about a passage that the apostle Paul wrote to the church at Philippi. So, I took a picture and pondered the deeper reasons for her moving from California to Georgia. Lisa was on a mission to serve the Lord.

On her road through life, these trophies lined up on the shelf like victorious soldiers testifying to her personal success. But at one, single point in time, she decided that what God thought about her mattered more than what she thought about herself and she made the same proclamation as Paul. “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” (Philippians 3:7-8) The great exchange. It begs the question for us all does it not? What kind of race are we running?

I’m reminded of a beautiful poem written by C.T. Studd, a British missionary in the late 1800s’. It seems fitting to recall the words.

Two little lines I heard one day traveling along life’s busy way; Bringing conviction to my heart and from my mind would not depart;