A Bizarre and Beautiful Life

A Bizarre and Beautiful Life



Would you like me to make you rich? ... Here goes ...


You exist. And you exist as "you," a unique and irreplaceable person. This is the gift of your self, your soul ... You could accept the entire global oil revenues of the last hundred years in trade for it, and you'd be worse off. Or, as Jesus put it, "What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?"


So life is a gift. Sometimes we can't really enjoy the gift because of pain or poverty (or, for that matter, because of busyness or selfishness). But the gift remains. And if there's one secret to receiving it well, it's learning to count our blessings from zero up rather than counting down from infinity.


Your body is part of your riches. Your capacity to touch and move and create and giggle and dance and rest. OK, my capacity to dance isn't going to make anyone rich, but you get the idea...

There's the glory of nature. Life in all its bizarre and bewildering beauty. Sunrises, cloudscapes, rattlesnakes, gazelles, oak trees, teardrops, fingerprints, early morning mists, midnight stars. We don't own any of this (even if we think we own part of it, we don't). But we can enjoy it.


And we can encounter it with other people. Love is a gift (what is that worth?). Company is a gift. Community is a gift. Over the centuries we've come to benefit from wisdom to understand the world. We have culture to celebrate it. And we have language to try to express all these privileges...


-Consumer Detox: Less Stuff, More Life, by Revd. Mark Powley