The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some have wandered away from the faith and have impaled themselves with a lot of pain because they made money their goal. – 1 Timothy 6:10
That phrase, “love of money,” in the original Greek, carries with it the sense of the passionate, emotional attachment you have with a lover. It’s all-consuming. It drives you. And ultimately, loving money in this way drives you to “a lot of pain.”
I read a story in the United Methodist devotional, The Upper Room, where a woman described a scene at her hummingbird feeder. She noted that there was always one male at the feeder that would aggressively chase the other hummingbirds away. Whenever one approached, he flew at it like a sleek feathered dart. She put up a second feeder a few feet away, thinking that would solve the problem. It didn’t. This little hummingbird would flit from feeder to feeder, chasing all the other birds away. He was so busy doing this that he never stopped to feed himself; he was too busy keeping others away, too busy keeping everything for himself.
If that bird had a brain bigger than a pea, at the end of the day he might reflect and say, “Well, I’ve been rather silly. I’m hungry and I’m tired. I have few true friends, since no one likes me for the way I’ve been acting. There’s more than enough food to go around, and that creature inside the house always fills it every day. Maybe I should relax more, eat my fill, and go ahead and fly around and enjoy the sights.”
Yes, if that hummingbird were smart, that’s what he’d think.
Good thing we can be smarter than some hummingbirds.
We can only hope.
We can only hope