Great wealth is sometimes in the possession of people who live impoverished lives. If you are ignorant of the value of what you possess, you are destined to live as if you never possessed it.
Loren Krytzer was a hard-working carpenter until a car accident in 2007 took one of his legs and left him disabled. He struggled to live on $1,000 a month, but everything changed in 2011 when he was watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow. In that episode, an elderly man was dumbfounded to learn that his Navajo blanket was worth a half-million dollars.
Krytzer owned a similar blanket. He had inherited his blanket initially because no one in his family realized its value, either. When his grandmother died, he had gone to her house to collect the books she had promised him. “Everything was already pillaged through by my sister and my mother,” he recalls.
The last bag in the house held two blankets passed down from his great-grandmother: a softer Hudson’s Bay blanket and the Navajo blanket his grandmother once laid out on the porch when her cat was having kittens. Krytzer’s sister grabbed the former, and the latter fell to the floor. “I said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ She said, ‘I don’t want that, that dirty old thing?’ I picked it up … put it in my closet and there it sat for seven years,” he said.
“Make It” by CNBC Nov 20, 2017
Despite the scoffing of family members and being turned away by several appraisers, Loren finds an auctioneer who realizes the value of what he possesses. On the day of the auction, he is told to conservatively anticipate $200,000. When the auction gavels to a close, the blanket sold for $1.5 million.
Human interest stories like Loren’s has a way of capturing our interest. Many people that hear the story will become more cautious of casting away material items they have had in storage for years for fear of unwittingly letting go of a high value item.
The real lesson is for believers to become more astute in the spiritual wealth that we already possess. In (2 Peter 1:2-4) we are told that God has divinely given unto us all things that pertain to our life and godliness. God has granted us great and precious promises. The Bible is acting as an informative appraiser. When we hear a promise like that, our jaws ought to drop faster and farther than Loren’s did.
Our thinking should be more elevated when we read “all things are yours…ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:21-23). There is no top to your spiritual net worth because of God’s redemptive work in you. If you are resting in the finished work of Christ on the cross and His affirming resurrection, you are joint-heirs with Jesus (Rom 8:17).
Loren’s problems did not go away because he pocketed an enormous amount of cash, and Christians still have difficulties. However, if we will remember the available spiritual resources Our Father always makes available to us, we should never be discouraged. Are you a spiritual appraiser of God’s promises?
