Monday of Week 8 in Ordinary Time
1 Pet 1:3-9
Mk 10:17-27
‘who can be saved?‘
A few years back, I came across two very different stories.
In the first, a man was working on his car when his three-year-old son took a screwdriver and scratched the car. Enraged, the man spanked his son’s hand, not realising that he was holding onto a spanner. The boy was hospitalised, and his hand had to be amputated. The man was distraught. Subsequently, he looked at his car and saw that his son was scratching out the words ‘I love my daddy’ across the paintwork.
In the next story, a man was driving his nephew in his newly-purchased car. The nephew was drinking a soft drink and inadvertently spilt it onto the car seat. The child was upset, but the man coolly took the rest of the can and nonchalantly poured it over the back seat.
Growing up, I had puzzled over today’s Gospel reading. I wondered what God had against riches and was even more confused when I realised a lot of Christians were extremely wealthy. I wondered how these people could go to heaven and why they were not doing anything about it.
It was only later that I realised what Jesus was talking about was the attachment that people have to their wealth. Rather than looking at these riches as gifts from God to be used for blessing others, these gifts become an end in itself, and people ended up clinging to these earthly ‘treasures’. It is this attachment that makes it difficult to ‘enter the kingdom of God’.
Brothers and sisters, like the man in the second story, let us strive to place people above things, not things above people.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Paul Wee)
Prayer: We pray, Father, that we may always place You first in our lives. Help us to focus our eyes on You, Lord.
Thanksgiving: Father, we praise and thank you for showing us the importance of detachment from our earthly wealth in our journey back to Your kingdom.
OXYGEN 
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