How Many Balls are Enough?
Edwin Friesen
The leaves were changing colors and fall was in the air. Lil and I were playing with our grandsons Jameson and Caleb on our spacious back yard engaging them in a variety of “games.” An assortment of balls lay scattered across the lawn, testimony to the short attention spans of the youngsters. The collection included a football, soccer balls, lawn croquet, bocce, baseballs and a couple of track balls.
Caleb, surveying the scattered balls, decided to claim all of them as his own. To secure his claim, he grouped them in a pile and tried to lie down on top of them, arms and legs outstretched to cover as many as possible. Inevitably one or another ball popped out leaving him most frustrated at not being able to control them all.
Curious about how far Caleb would take this, we decided to add to his frustration by gathering more balls from our toy collection in the basement. Yes, he wanted each of them as well and tried valiantly to add them to his cache, struggling to keep all of them under his grasp. But by now there were simply too many balls and too few arms and legs. As one or the other ball slipped from his grasp, his older brother Jameson laughed, picked up the ball and ran off to play. What a dilemma!
Caleb loves to run after balls but now, getting up and joining Jameson in play would mean losing control of “his” stash. Right now his focus was hoarding, not sharing. Ironically, unless he was willing to relinquish his grip, Caleb couldn’t even enjoy the balls himself. In fact, he was in bondage to the balls. Paradoxically, those balls actually belonged to us and when the boys got picked up a little later, the balls stayed at Grandma and Grandpa’s house ready to be enjoyed the next time. The whole episode was amusing but in a sad kind of way.
Though he didn’t know it, Caleb was doing an excellent job of mimicking adult behavior, sometimes mine, sometimes yours. Like Caleb, we often feel we don’t have enough. Oh we are more sophisticated in our hoarding, but all too often we try to grasp things we don’t really need and try to put our ownership stamp on things God has temporarily given to us to manage and enjoy. And that reminds me of the wisdom of Solomon. Here is the child’s version of Eccl 5:10 followed by the adult version.
“You will never have enough balls to make you fully happy. If all you think about is how to get more balls, you will never be content with the number of balls you already have”.
“Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income…”
Remember if you want to feel poor, hoard; if you want to feel rich, share.
First published in 2007