All That You Have

The main thing that I learned after reading this week’s directed study, and my own personal study, is that God just wants us to give our all; regardless of what we actually have available to us. He doesn’t care about what effort we put in, he cares about how much we gave up to put the effort in. The story about the widow casting in her life to donate into the treasury struck me really hard this week because it talks about casting in everything you have and everything that’s important to you in order to come closer to the Creator.  Casting in all of our living gets us more than we could ever wish for.

Mark 12:41-44

I loved this passage of scripture. To sum it up, it's basically about the people who cast their money into the treasury. Basically how it worked back then is that if you put money in, you helped pay for the sacrifice at the temple. It was significant when people donated towards the sacrificial ceremony because it was a sacrifice for them to donate their money in the first place. How the story goes is that Jesus sees a bunch of people donating money in, usually just something that isn't worth much to them. Then, he sees a poor widow donate some money and she threw in all that she had. She cast in her living, and for that, she basically gave herself to Christ the way that he did for her.

This story teaches us that we must cast in our own livings, the things that are important to us, as a sacrifice to come closer to Christ. This is very similar to what we learn from the certain man and the requirements of eternal life back in last week's readings in Matthew 19: 16-21. However, in this story, the person is poor and obeys by casting in all that she had.

In general, I think that this week changed my perspective on what putting effort in actually looks like. Heavenly Father knows that we live busy lives and that we can’t just give everything up to go and help everybody we see. He knows that we have certain responsibilities, and instead just asks us to do one simple thing. He asks us to turn to Him. He asks us to be Christ-like in those responsibilities and help others to turn to Him. He may ask us to do these things in different ways. It might not always be to lead by example, it could be to let someone else help us, or to delegate or challenge someone to learn more about Christ. Either way, God has a plan for each and every one of us. It’s up to us to have the faith to be willing to become a tool in his hands, and cast in all of our living so that we can be so.

Christ gave up his life so that we could come back to Heavenly Father. He gave up his blood, his flesh, and everything that he was just so that we could be happy. The least that we can do for Him is sacrifice our agency, the thing that only Heavenly Father's plan could have, in order to serve Him and His children.