The Value of Things
I Cor. 7:23
You were bought with a price…
I have paid $14 for a new men’s Summer suit. I have filled my gas tank with fuel costing 11 cents per gallon.
Old people are alleged to have developed, during their long lives, what the experts refer to as “reference pricing”. I see myself as being affected by this phenomenon. I find the effects of this to be occasionally painful. I was reminded yesterday at the checkout register at Kroger that the price of groceries has gone up. I had stopped to pick up a few odds and ends from a mid-week list that Jackie had given me. My bill was just short of $90 (eggs were on the list). I suppose a man in his twenties might just have forked over his Visa card and gotten on down the road, but I experienced mild upset. It is a common shock and is always evoked by my mental reference to an old A & P on Michigan Avenue in Lansing. Jackie was already graduated and working as a Registered Nurse at Sparrow Hospital. I was still a student. We were newlyweds. Grocery shopping was new to us. The memory reference involves the cost of two weeks of groceries. I can see the shopping cart with the foodstuffs neatly packed in paper bags. My memory includes handing the cashier a twenty-dollar bill and always receiving a few coins in change! The year was 1960.
Our daughter Sarah called a couple of months ago to say that she had just seen our first little house in Plymouth Township on Zillow. She had never actually lived there, but we had told her about it and had taken her to see it a couple of times. It was a little three-bedroom, one bath ranch with a family room. At the time (1968) there were square miles of similar housing for sale in the Western suburbs. We bought our little place for around $17,000. Later Jackie pulled up the record of sale that Sarah had seen. It was our old house! It had just sold for a little over $300, 000.
While we were still in school, we bought a brand-new 1961 Ford Falcon from Max Curtis Ford in Lansing. Granted it was a stripped-down version. The total cost was $1,700.
Reference pricing is real for a man my age and it is also likely to be painful. However, the pain is passing as is the temporal context within which the reference arises. Therefore, though it may be interesting, it has no permanent significance.
When grace found me, I was a spiritually dead sinner – not worth much on the “soul exchange”. I was an object of the wrath of a just God. I was destined for judgment where I would find myself without one word to offer in my defense. I was, as Mark Twain would describe a mule: “Having no pride in the past, nor hope for the future”. The Father chose to purchase me! His reason for that specific choice is not disclosed. It has nothing to do with my merit. The price paid was beyond imagination! The motive behind His purchase is revealed: So that I would bring him glory.
I must be about my Master’s business!
George Moore
Elder Emeritus
