Paying the Cost

In the spirit of vulnerability that I have been trying to cultivate this lenten season, I want to share a story about my life that is still a source of pain.  It happened when I went to graduate school for Math.  For those of you who don't know.  I was a math major in college and was then offered a fellowship to the University of Delaware to pursue doctoral studies in mathematics.  One could say my time there did not go well.  Prior to graduate school, math had always come easy to me.  Whenever I looked at a problem I loved finding the connections between other theorems and finding the eventual solution.  There was a problem though.  While I certainly had a talent for mathematics, I began resting on that and ceased to put the effort necessary into cultivating it.  This refusal to put in the hard work made it impossible to succeed in graduate school.  The things that once were clear to me no longer made sense.  The connections that before seemed like connect the dots were now much more akin to deciphering ancient Syriac.  By the end of the first year, I had convinced the department and myself that it was time for me to leave.  You see the problem in my story is that none of this cost me anything.  I didn't need to put in hard work to get good grades in undergrad and my fellowship not only covered my tuition but even gave me a stipend to live off of.  The fact that it didn't cost me anything is what eventually made it cost me so much.

Now flash forward a few years, the pain of that experience is still in my heart and I have worked through most of it, but the knowledge of that failure still lingers.  When I entered Seminary the same concerns ran through my head, but there is a difference here.  Seminary costs me something.  It requires me to put in the time to write the papers, do the research and yes of course there is the tuition that is anything but free.  Yet at the same time this experience has been far more valuable to me.  It has even brought healing to the pains I felt from failing.  There is an old adage that says something along the lines that the things that are most valuable to us are the things we fought for.  Certainly this has been a lesson that I have learned from these experiences.


I think the person I relate to the most in the Bible is David.  He had a heart that yearned for God and yet when he messed up, he messed up big.  In fact one of those failures came near the end of his life.  He had this desire to see how his army measured up to other kingdoms and so he went out and counted them.  Now certainly this seems reasonable through modern eyes, but Joab, the commander of his armies, rightly saw this as going against the will of God.  David's taking of the census showed that David was looking to rely on the might of Israel rather than the might of God.  In a sense David wanted to rest on his own talents and strength rather than putting in the much harder work of trusting in God.  David's sin brought tragic consequences to Israel as thousands of men died from a plague.  David was convicted immediately and went off to build an altar and sacrifice to God.  An interesting thing happens at that point.  He was instructed to build the altar on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.  Araunah immediately offered it to him free of charge and even brought in cattle for him to make the sacrifice, but I love what David said here.  He said, "No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing." (2 Samuel 24:24)  This is the heart of the man of God.  He refuses to offer something to God that costs him nothing.  His heart is for his people and is grieving over their suffering.  By buying the altar and the sacrifice, he is fighting for them.  It shows his willingness to give of himself for the sake of his people and it displays the contrite heart that God loves.  I think it was this action more than the sacrifice itself that moved God to relent.

I'm guessing that you could probably think of a time or two where something was simply given to you or something came easy and because of that you never really appreciated it.  I was flipping through the channels the other day and stumbled across an advertisement for some show that follows around rich kids.  It seemed to me that they were simply bored with their lives.  They looked at everything and everyone as easily discarded because they didn't have to work for it.  Undoubtedly the show is probably more fake than real, but the truth of it still stands.  When we don't pay the cost for something, we fail to appreciate it for what it's worth.  It is the things that we fight for and strive after that find value in our lives.  Therefore may we strive after the things that are of God.  May we follow in David's footsteps and give God an offering that costs us something.