heart and money

Luke 12.34:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Yesterday I was listening to the radio and someone pointed out that, as a society, the amount we pay people to do things reflects our values. So we pay people who entertain us on TV vastly more money than we pay our school teachers, for example.

This reminded me immediately of the above verse - where Jesus challenges people to think carefully about their use of possessions and how it might affect their deep-rooted attitudes and beliefs.

Belief and action are a complex set of interwoven things. Sometimes we do things from a very deep sense of conviction and sometimes doing things - perhaps we are told to - leads us to a sense of conviction. Sometimes both actions and belief work together and sometimes they pull apart and leave us feeling fragmented and tired.



The feeling that "if you hear it on TV it must be true" seems unreal and yet i hear people say that all the time, and they are talking about the most outrageous concepts. Our hearts cannot get pulled into an apparently easier mode of listening and absorbing instead of thinking and interacting.

I guess this was what jarred me about what the man on the Radio said, not the truth of how much we pay people but the latent existence behind that. Are we becoming people who need constant heroes because we have lost faith in ourselves? If being ordinary means that we have somehow failed because we are not the exceptional star then it questions the very integrity of our society.