Wow.

I first saw the story I'm going to link here over at the Anchoress' place, but maybe some of you don't read her blog regularly:

"We thought we were the richest family in church"

Okay, maybe this is more of a parable than an it-literally-happened-just-this-way story, but like all parables, it teaches an important lesson.

It's funny - I can kind of relate to the story. My dad was a college prof and low-level administrator when I was growing up, and I thought we were rich. We always had plenty of food on the table, we took fun vacations to National Parks, there were always gifts at Christmas and on our birthdays. (And we got to go out to eat - a rare treat in those days - at a restaurant of our choosing on our birthdays). We went to the movies when there was one we all wanted to see (We all saw the original "Star Wars" together as a family). My mom used to speak wonderingly of how many toys my brother and I had compared to what she had growing up.

One year, the church we belonged to did the "$100 Christmas" - where, the idea was, you spent far less on fancy things like expensive gifts and new clothes, and took the money you saved that you would have spent on the family, and donated it. It was a challenge that year - but in my family we're all pretty talented, and we made a lot of the gifts we gave each other. And the money we donated, if I remember correctly, went to a Salvation Army program that helped people pay for the necessities like food and heat.

But then, later on - in junior high school and later - I began to wonder about things. A lot of the kids had designer jeans (this was when the Jordache label was first really, really popular) and I wore Lees or some store brand. And I didn't have any Izod shirts (those polo shirts, with the little alligator: some kids had a different color for each day of the week. Each day of every 2 weeks, even). And in high school, once, when a friend of mine (who was, at least in the monetary sense, from a wealthier family than mine: her family owned a rather large and profitable business) was having an argument with me, she threw up her hands and said, "Poor people! You can't make them understand."

So I was kind of shocked by that - after all, we weren't POOR, my family had enough - but I began to wonder.

Of course, not too long after that, I went off to college, where one of my best friends was someone on scholarship. And one of our nemeses in the dormitory was a vapid "rich" girl from Colorado, who did things like throw away her last season's clothes because she didn't feel like packing them back home with her. (We staged a guerrilla raid on the trash can and donated what we could salvage to a local thrift shop). I would never have been able to have afforded to pay for a whole new set of clothes each season.

But the thing is, looking back on it, I realize now that my family WAS rich. For one thing, we had enough: there was enough food. We had enough clothing. The lights stayed on, the heat stayed on. We could afford gifts at holidays - maybe not lavish gifts, but nice ones all the same - and vacations once or sometimes twice a year (maybe not to the Bahamas, like some of my friends in school, and maybe we stayed in Holiday Inns, but we did take vacations). But more importantly, my parents knew - and taught my brother and me - what was really important in life. And like the girl in that story, who realized that since her family was able to give $87 ($70 of it being money they had actually raised, or saved by careful budgeting, themselves) that they were rich after all.