Poor Uncle Billy. It’s a wonderful life in the Christmas classic movie – until he can’t explain what happened to $100,000 in cash … that he misplaced.
Who can forget the panicky run on the Bedford Falls Bank. Fortunately, just a movie.
Not just a movie this past week in Silicon Valley. The failure of the sixteenth largest bank in the country triggered financial jitters from coast to coast.
With soaring prices, a pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, weird weather — it again puts quotation marks around the word “security.”
I remembered a Great Depression story from a friend. A scene his dad never forgot from his boyhood, when banks were shuttered across the country.
A man outside his bank, beating his hands bloody on the bars in front of the bank. Desperately yelling, “Give me my money!”
His security had been in that building. But beating on the bars wouldn’t bring it back.
The question raised by the relentless shocks of our time remains: “Where is my security?”
After the institutional collapse in 2008, a well-placed Wall Street acquaintance said, “Ron, I know what us Jesus guys on the Street would’ve said if you’d asked us where our trust was. We’d have said, ‘Oh, our trust is in the Lord.’ Until that day in 2008 when what we really trusted in was suddenly gone.”
As devotional author Oswald Chambers wrote: “It is when a crisis arises that we instantly reveal upon whom we rely.”
Upheavals — financial, political, medical, marital, parental — expose the unsettling inadequacy of our life anchors. From our bank account to our education, from our relationships to our plans.
Like the “fragile” sticker on breakable cargo — that can go on so many things we call “security.”
Personally, I’ve found the Bible offers transcendent insight on what bedrock to build a life on.
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