When I was a boy, my grandfather smoked White Owl cigars…
They came in boxes made of thick cardboard decorated with the White Owl logo…
As soon as he brought the cigars home, he’d take them out of the box and put them one-at-a-time in a glass humidor.
When the cigars were transferred, the boxes were mine!
They were the perfect place to keep my treasures…
- My Cub Scout pocket knife…
- The pennies my parents gave me when they got change at the store…
- The special shiny rock I’d found in our flower bed…
(Could that rock be gold? Would our family be rich for generations-to-come because of my chance discovery of the “Rose Bed Gold Mine”?)
It gave me a good feeling to open the box and gaze at my treasures…
But soon I had a problem…
My grandfather smoked one or two cigars a day…
Before long, I had more boxes than treasures.
And then one day everything changed and I found a new use for the extra treasure boxes.
In my house some things were strictly forbidden…
Committing any of those forbidden family crimes would result in the ultimate penalty.
Most days the fear of that penalty — whatever it might be—hung over my head like an invisible boulder dangling from the thinnest of threads.
But on this day, the thrill of today’s adventure outweighed the fear of tomorrow’s consequences…
I committed one of the deadly sins of our household….
I played with matches.
The dining room candles sat on the table year after year, blackened only by dust…
The matches were in a kitchen drawer…
I took out a match and struck it against the side of the box…
It blazed into flame!
Quickly I transferred the flame to the candles…
They were beautiful.
Then I remembered the threat of the ultimate punishment… whatever it might be…and blew out the candles…
My mother would notice the blackened wicks and melted wax…and the mystery of the ultimate punishment would be revealed…
My hands started to shake as I replaced the candles with new ones from a nearby drawer.
But where could I hide the burned candles?
I would put them in one of my White Owl Cigar boxes and bury it behind the garage.
And that’s what I did…
My mother never found the buried candles…
But somehow my joy in my treasure boxes diminished…
Every time I opened a box to count my pennies or gaze at my shiny rock, I thought of the secrets buried in the box behind the garage and my joy was mixed with guilt and fear…
I am a lot older now…
I don’t keep my treasures in a cigar box anymore.
I keep my treasures in my heart…In my soul.
I wonder…
How often do I use my soul the same way I used those boxes?
How often do I bury sin and guilt where only joy should live?
How often do I grieve the spirit of God?
Do not make God’s Holy Spirit sad… Ephesians 4:30
How often do I forget that the greatest treasure of all… the greatest gift of all…is the grace of God?
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, Ephesians 2:8
