Last night my son and I took turns reading short stories before bedtime, as is our longstanding ritual. We'd finished The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy last year, and needed some lighter fare.
We're currently halfway through a book of folk tales from around the world. I received it as a gift from a third grade student's parents (my college job was as a Sunday School teacher) when my stubble was less flecked with gray. One of last night's stories resonated.
In the early times, humans were constantly worried about death. They were so deeply preoccupied that they could barely eat. This angered the worms, who decided to petition the supreme being.
"You promised us meat, but humans are nothing but skin and bones when they are buried." The being mulled it over, and decided they were right, so the being created money.
Now humans were constantly preoccupied with how much money they were making, whether they had enough of it, how they could make more of it, where they planned to spend it.
They spent great sums of money on feasts and grew fat, and the worms were happy.
Two things struck me about the parable. The first, of course, was the tremendous distraction that money provides.
The second is how that distraction can take us away from asking those more important questions by becoming our main focus. Given the reality of death and the finite nature of our lifespans, what questions should we spend our time asking and answering? What efforts will impart the value and meaning we seek to superimpose on our lives?