A few nights ago, I had a dream that I won $80,000 from a community game of bingo at my local grocery store. I wondered only briefly what I would do with it before it started going. I gave a thousand dollars to the elderly lady I almost hit driving to bingo at the grocery store (why I was driving there by myself when my learner's strictly says I must have an adult in the car, I'll never know.) I think she was at bingo too. And then I gave another thousand dollars to a kind gentleman who helped me fill my car up with gas before bingo. (Now he was not at bingo, so I guess I must have tracked him down - yet I found him surprisingly fast. It was like a dream ...) Then I started giving money to my family. And finally I took my mom to Europe. And the $80,000 was gone. I had rejoiced in every penny spent, because dreams were coming true, but now that it was gone, an emptiness filled me.
Why do we associate money with happiness? Why do our big dreams always include us wealthy? Why do we think it wonderful to win a million (or eighty thousand) dollars? Before my dream I never thought that I was too obsessed with money - especially as this Christmas season of charity and gratitude is upon us. But dreams have ways of bringing vague notions swimming in our subconscious to bright, powerful images that have lasting effects on us. We remember them. And we wonder what was in our heads that made us dream them.
Maybe I wasn't obsessed with money before my dream, but it was still a blessed reminder that couldn't have come at a better time. Christmas is one of the most difficult times of year when we find ourselves focusing so much on the material we forget its true meaning. Whether it's money specifically we worry about or whether it's other things that money can buy or take away, we find ourselves blinded to the one thing money can't buy - the gift of Jesus Christ. The Incarnation. We can think we'll find joy in our money, but we won't. When the last of the $80,000 has been spent, our fleeting happiness is gone. Let us remember this, when the last gift has been bought, returned and a new gift has been re-bought: lasting joy comes only from Christ.