For What It’s Worth

Once my best friend in the world, Christi, and I decided to have a garage sale together.  It was a glorious time in life when she lived literally a block away from me, and we decided it would be brilliant to have a sale together.

We had loads of toys and clothes and kid stuff.  It was a pretty incredible garage sale.  We decided to have it in my driveway, since it had the best access from the street, so she had to bring several car loads over.  Well, you know how garage salers are.  They were already prowling around the yard the second we began to put out tables.

I was trying to organize some of the things that she had just dropped off when a man approached me.  He had one of Christi’s cardboard boxes in his hand.

“How much for all of these?”  he asked in a nonchalant, I-could-take-them-or-leave-them kind of way.

The box was filled with VCR tapes.  Some were actual movies, and others were tapes that Christi or her husband had used to record football games and those kinds of things that we did back when VCRs were the only way that regular people could DVR things.  I noticed a few of the tapes had labels, but who knew what was really on the tapes, since we all had the tendency to record over things?

I should’ve stopped and thought a little harder about some of those labels, since one was clearly marked SONOGRAM in big black letters.

I sold the box of tapes to the guy for $5.

When Christi came back, I proudly presented her with her first five dollars of the day, and told her about the old man buying her VCR tapes.   She looked slightly pale for a minute.  She smiled in her sweet way, and explained that she had planned to go through that box to make sure nothing important was in there.

Suddenly I knew that I had just sold her son’s ultrasound tape to a man who would likely head straight home and record the Price is Right over it.  I thought the tapes were barely worth five dollars, but to her that one special recording was priceless.

In some ways this is how people view the Christian faith.  Those who don’t understand it can’t see its worth.  They toss it out with the other junk, putting it on the same plane as other religions.  But, Christianity is radically different, and it doesn’t belong in the same box as the other teachings and philosophies.  The Christian faith doesn’t need champions or cheerleaders to be true.  It is intrinsically real and absolutely true, whether people recognize its worth or not.

Well, thankfully the Great Ultrasound Sell-off didn’t end my friendship with Christi.  On that chilly morning, standing in the sunshine on my cracked driveway, surrounded by piles of outgrown toys, we laughed.  And the truth is, I would give anything to have another garage sale with her.  I might even let her sell our wedding video, if we had one.  But, that’s another story altogether.