Trading Up

Kyle McDonald is a blogger who started with a single red paperclip and through a series of fourteen trades always trading up to something bigger or better he eventually managed to trade all the way up to a house. Sometimes, when we hear the word sacrifice we think of it as something that we are giving up when we should really be thinking of it in terms of trading up. When the widow of Zarephath was asked by the prophet Elijah to make for him a piece of bread with the very last of her flour and oil, she may have been tempted to think of doing this as giving up her and her son’s very last meal. But what the Lord was trying to teach her was that what she was really doing was trading up. Her dream was too small. Her last wish was for one final meal for her and her son before they both died. The Lord asked her to trade this in for something much better - enough bread to keep them alive through the famine and for many long years after. The widow with the two mites  who threw in all she had understood that she was trading up. She had the equivalent of a single red paperclip and she was willing to trade that in for a house in the mansions of her Father in Heaven.We get tricked into thinking that a sacrifice is just us giving up something that we love, because we are not able to immediately perceive or appreciate the value of what the Lord is giving us in return. But we can be assured that if our Father asks us to give up the stone or the serpent that we’ve been clinging to, it is only because He wants to trade it for a loaf of bread or a fish. I know that we can’t yet imagine that anything could be better than what we have right now, and what the Lord is asking us to trade in. But I also know that we will eventually be able to see how much better off we are with the trades that we have made. We all start with a little red paperclip, but our Father wants us to trade line upon line, and precept upon precept, going from grace to grace, until eventually we are trading in everything that we have for everything that our Father in Heaven has.