The price on your soul

<idle musing>
At what price do you value your soul? Most people would say they value their soul quite highly. If someone offered them a million dollars to do something they knew was wrong, would they take the money? Lots of books and movies have been made on that storyline. Most people would probably say it depended on how bad the thing they were to do was. After all, God grades on a curve, doesn’t he?

In actual fact, I have found that most people value their soul much less highly than they say they do. For example, the other day I went into a store to purchase a lawn mower blade. It is an odd size, 22 inches, and the store didn’t have any on display. The sales person offered to look in the back room for one, a noble gesture. Sure enough, he found a 22 inch blade, still in the package. Now, the blade I had brought in to show him was plainly a mulching blade, but the blade he was selling me very plainly said “bagging blade” on the package. He saw it, but he was willing to sell his soul for about $14.00 by pretending that this was what I needed.

You might think he sold his soul much more cheaply than you would, but stop and think about it for a minute. I will give you another example: Wednesday night we went to the grocery store and the cashier failed to charge us for 2 gallons of filtered water and mis-rung our fresh broccoli as cucumbers. We didn’t notice it until we got home and looked over the receipt. The total bill was off by about $1.60 in our favor. What would you do?

Would you just blow it off and say, “It was their mistake. God clearly blessed me with an extra $1.60!” Suppose the total were off the other way, and you were overcharged $1.60, would you just blow it off and say, “Oh well, God clearly blessed me!” You are the rare one if you would!

Well, I went back Thursday afternoon (it was too late on Wednesday) and pointed out that I owed them money. The reaction was what it always is—astonishment. That alone is an indictment against our society. It shows that our real god is money, but that is another story for another day...

I submit to you that if you didn’t go back and point out the error and pay the balance, you sold your soul. Further, I would venture to say that most people would sell their soul for a quarter. What do you think?
</idle musing>