Sunday – 17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel – Matthew13:44-52

Hidden Treasure – Greatest Joy

Tennessee Sunrise

I admit it!  The last 2 years have been unforgettable.  And yet, truth be told, I wish I could forget a good portion of it!  The emotion and stress of physically moving from our home of 40 years!  The effort of sorting through all those memories and ‘stuff’.  The gut-wrenching separation from family and dear friends!  Those moments of despair and joy from Ginger’s countless medical appointments and procedures, diagnoses and chemo, lab tests and blood work, and then some of my own share and share alike, I guess)!  The little victories with ‘normal’ test results!  The worry and boundless love for my ‘honey’.  Pain, sadness, fear, despair, emptiness!  Admittedly, there have been more storm clouds than sunshine!  A rollercoaster of emotions and events!  And we haven’t always managed the stress all that well as the moods overtake our daily life!

But then I get up in the morning and look out on a landscape filled with mountains and valleys adorned with forests of trees and foliage, with neighbors far off in the distance (quite a change from living in Chicago).  The sun coming up through the trees and over the hills!  The chirps and tweets of all the birds, over 20 different varieties at last count, coming to breakfast at our front porch feeder (which I dutifully fill every morning).  Their chorus of chatter and tweets filling our ears!  The sound of the sheep and goats across the road – baa and baa- answering our call!  The sight of horses and mules and cows down in the valley chomping away on the pasture grass!  The deer feeding on the wild berries and sometimes the garden veggies (oops!)  and the utter stillness of a quiet evening sitting outside. And then there is the night sky filled with a blanket of bright stars in the midst of such absolute blackness!  And our wonderful daughter Jaime, our gentleman farmer and son-in-law Josh, and our grandsons Tyler and Nate, looking down on us from their home on the hill above us on the family Ponderosa! And through it all, sharing this life, this day and the next, with my sweetie! 

And that’s when I realized the real treasure, that hidden treasure that all of us, way too often, ignore or take for granted!  That treasure that today’s Gospel speaks of!

A laborer is working in the field plowing the land and he finds a hidden treasure.  He is just a tenant on the land, not the owner.  And the law at the time dictates that anything found on the land belongs to the owner, not the one who finds it.  So what does he do?  He re-buries the treasure and then goes off and scrapes together every bit of money he can; he probably even sells most of his possessions.  And he then buys the land from the owner in order to possess the treasure.

He is willing to pay any price, endure any hardship just to get that treasure.  He is willing to sacrifice everything; no price is too high!  That is ridiculous, that makes no human sense at all! To give up any and everything you have just to possess one thing!   And yet we all know there are treasures in our life worth any price!

That treasure was always there in the field.  The laborer never noticed, never looked.  What about us? Do we let the cares of the world blind us to the treasures of God’s Creation?  How often do we miss the treasure of God’s love in our lives?  What is that treasure in your life that God is calling you to search for?