Meditation 7 - No Wanting

Last week a mom contacted me, a woman who remembered reading devotional books of mine to her kids many years ago. She said she liked them and decided to do it again, even though the kids are long gone. She picked up No Kidding, God, and there on pp. 24-25, she said, she rediscovered a meditation that helped her understand some things she was only feeling, she says. She wrote to thank me.

No Kidding, God came out 35 years ago, a quarter century before 2016, when the subject of the meditation she read took an elevator into American lives in a fashion that no one will ever forget. For the record, not once in my life did this Calvinist own or even look to a crystal ball.

I meant no politics when I wrote this in 1988. It's just a meditation for middle schoolers. 

No Wanting

When Donald Trump is at home in New York, he sometimes flies around in his ten-million dollar helicopter, a ten-seat French Puma he claims is the safest in the world.

His cottage on the ocean at Palm Beach, Florida, has 118 rooms, its own private golf course, and over four hundred feet of beach. But for quick weekend getaways, he and his wife prefer their Greenwich, Connecticut, hideaway, a modest 47-room bungalow they picked up for a song at only two million.

What's Trump worth? Some say as much as three billion dollars. In addition to operating all kinds of casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, he owns some of New York City's finest real estate, an airline company, his own Boeing 727, and a half dozen helicopters. Not bad for a guy just over forty years old.

Perhaps the gem, however, is the twenty-nine million dollar yacht named, appropriately, the Trump Princess, a cute little runabout with gold-plated shower nozzles, a rotating sun bed and, of all things, an in­side waterfall.

Trump's New York penthouse takes up all kinds of space in his own Trump Tower. It's a homey little nook with an eighty-foot living room that Trump has outfitted with onyx baseboards. And guess what else it has? You knew already? Another waterfall.

Trump, who says, "It's all a game really," plays well and hard at the Monopoly board he's set up over New York's fanciest avenues. When anyone gets in his way or tries to fight him, he calls in his palace guard-ten different legal firms that take care of his affairs.

What's more, he likes fights. "I love to have enemies," he says. "I like beating my enemies to the ground."

Nice guy, too, besides having all those bucks.

"The Lord is my shepherd," David says. "I shall not be in want." Neither will Donald Trump. Not on earth, anyway.

He's become a symbol of the lust for wealth that haunts the dreams of whso many today-people who want to be the high rollers, the ones o make big bucks. With all that loot, Trump shall not want; if he does, he'll just buy. He knows there are just two ways to live in this sworld. One is with God. The other is with big bucks. He's taken the second option, and he's trumped just about everyone in the game.

"Hey, life is life," he says. "We're here for a short time. When we're gone, most people don't care, and in some cases they're quite happy about it."

If that's what he believes, then what he does makes great sense. If all there is to life is one big swing through, one chance to let loose, then you may as well push the pedal to the floor and get what you what you can because you only go around once.

The other way to live is by faith and praise, by trusting that God is the Creator and Governor of the whole world, and by praising that very God for loving us so much that he sent his Son to die for us--a free gift of love, no additional payments.

With that gift, we will never want--not even when Trump will. Because someday he will. Count on it.

That fact you can take to the bank.

_______________________ 

The man's second impeachment trial begins today.