My Inheritance

I was raised in a home where money was scarce. Most of my clothes came from boxes given to us by other people or were made from material that my mother ripped up and remade to fit me. I remember my mother making me a dress from new material when I was six, a white voile dress with yellow flowers. She bought me a new dress when I was eeven and made me a suit from new material when I was fifteen. Those stand out in my memory. I think everything else fell into the first described categories.

My mother lived until she was past 90. The last five years of her life were spent in her own room at the Meaford Nursing Home - a place she loved and enjoyed to the full. Her rent for this modest space was something around $2000 a month. Despite the very modest means of her life and the expense of these last years, when she passed away there was a modest inheritance for each of her six children. That was the most poignant part of her passing to me - not that I had a little cash but that after all the years of careful living financially, she had cared for a family and then for herself and still a little to spare at the end. It was our inheritance.

When I picked up my devotional book this morning the page fell open informing me of another inheritance. Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled.” John 14:27. My inheritance!! My little inheritance from my mother is long gone - spent!! Yet this huge inheritance from my Father above, at the deepest levels of my emotion, of my thinking, of my attitudes, of my behaviors, so many times sits unused, unspent. I wonder why! Do you know?