“The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure…” Matthew 13:44a ESV1
Read Matthew 13:44
Not far from the home in which I was raised, stood an abandoned house. As a child, I often daydreamed about what was in that old house. Contrary to reason, never once did I imagine that the rundown house was home to rodents, varmints, and pests of all kinds, or dust, mold, and rotten wood, or a plethora of useless, broken items. Every time I thought about that faded yellow house with the falling-in porch, the shot-out windows, and the holey roof, I imagined that it was the hiding place of a vast treasure. I assumed that house, set back from the road and surrounded by trees, had been the perfect cover for a band of thieves who had stored piles of cash under the floorboards, jewels in the registers, and bags of gold, of incalculable worth, between the studs of the walls. Of course, in my dreams, the robbers had, for whatever reason, been forced to leave behind their hide-out and loot. If only my parents would have allowed me to explore that old house; I was sure I would have brought back a treasure that would have changed for the better the course of the lives of my family members.