The problem’s with our world…

I was listening to the radio on my way to work today, which is not the norm because I normally listen to the bible. Anyway, I was listening and after a short time they posed a question and asked for people to call in with responses. Both the answer of 1 of the hosts and 9/10 of the callers answers deeply saddened me. So what was the question?

 Recently you may or may not have read that a family found $10,000 on their front lawn. The family took the money to the local police station, as per the law. The question raised on this show was ‘what would you do if you found $10,000. Now, I expected a few people to say ‘I’d keep it’ but I have to admit to being deeply saddened that out of the 10 callers I heard, 8 said they’d keep it and 2 said they had this happen to them and they had taken the money to police. 1 of these 2 got the money back after it wasn’t claimed, the other didnt and said they would never hand the money over again.

What made me saddest was one of the host almost belittling anyone who would hand the money to the police. They could not understand for a moment why someone would hand over $10,000 when they may not get it back, saying instead they should take a holiday with it.

The next thing that saddened me was when a caller said what I was thinking, ‘what if it was you who lost $10,000′ then summarily dismissed it by saying ‘if someone was stupid enough to lose $10,000 they don’t deserve to get it back.’

And we wonder why the world is in such a mess…it appears to me that we are so self-centred, just take a look over the world’s landscape and that is exactly what IMO appears to be wrong with this world. Even myself, who would definately hand the $10,000 to the police, realise there are many times when I think of myself and not others and this saddens me too.

It strangely reminded me of a story I read about heaven and hell. Basically in the story a man died. For some reason God let him see hell first and the man saw a HUGE table covered with the most gourmet looking food. Seated around this table were all the people in hell, strapped to a chair. In front of them all were great, big huge bowls of food and each person had a very long spoon strapped to their forearm, just slightly too big to be able to eat the soup. Each person around this table was a scrawny as scrawny can be and they were all crying out as they tried to eat but could not get the spoon into their mouths.

When the man saw this he said to God ‘this is terrible, what torment’. So God showed him heaven. To the man’s surprise, very little was different in heaven. In fact, the only thing different in heaven than hell was that, instead of all the people being scrawny they were all very plump and well fed.

Perplexed the man asked God ‘what’s the deal?’ God answered the man saying ‘All the people in hell are caught up trying to feed themselves the delicious feast that is before them but because the spoon is so long, they can’t. In heaven however, the people have learnt to use the long spoon to feed one another.

God I pray that I can be like the people in heaven in this story and think of others, rather than always think of myself, which is so prevalent in this world…