Treasure in Heaven

I was in my twenties and if I didn’t start seeing my Christian faith expressed through action, I was ready to walk away from it all.

Leaders at my church suggested I join the stewardship committee. They said it would show people how much the youth cared about church fundraising. The problem was I didn’t care about church fundraising at all, not even a little bit, so I decided to consult Jesus. His advice to the rich young man was what leapt out at me:

“Go, sell what you have and give to the poor,

and you will have treasure in heaven.

Then come, follow me.” (Mt 19:21)

The only thing of value I had at the time was a 1979 Harley Davidson Sportster, so I sold it and followed Jesus into the mountains of El Salvador. I’d always heard we were supposed to see Jesus in the least of our brothers and sisters, so I moved to Tierra Nueva, the poorest community I’d ever seen. I started reading gospel stories to my neighbors under a mango tree there and asking how they understood them. No stewardship committee necessary, I thought to myself.

Then along came Hurricane Mitch.

“We were talking about the story about the fish and loaves,” Tierra Nueva community leader Don Justo told me after the storm. “We decided the miracle wasn’t that God made bread. We make bread ourselves, so shouldn’t be surprised that the creator of the universe also knows the recipe. The miracle in that story was that people shared their bread. That’s why we set aside 800 pounds of beans for you to take to the people who lost everything.”

My heart sank. I’ll go to my grave never having done something so generous, I thought to myself. The people of Tierra Nueva were poorer than most the hurricane victims. Those beans were all they had. They could’ve sold them to buy necessities like salt, cooking oil, and medicine for their children. Twenty out of twenty families in Tierra Nueva knew what it was like to lose a child in infancy. When asked how their babies died, most mothers answered simply, “diarrhea.”

I wanted to tell them to keep their beans, but I knew they’d be humiliated to be told they were too poor to be generous. I was hoping for a way to live up to the generosity they a taught me when Harry Westmoreland came to visit us in El Salvador. He taught me to drill water wells, but his impact on my life extended far beyond that. Harry was the first person to tell me I could make a living by helping people. He said God would provide somehow, and I believed him.

We never were able to provide water for the people of Tierra Nueva. It was too rocky there, but after Harry left, we started drilling wells at refugee centers for people displaced by the hurricane. Then we drilled wells for people across the country, but I never did find a way to pay Don Justo or Harry Westmoreland back for the lessons they taught me. Both have since passed away.

Back when Jesus told me to “go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” I wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about. Now I believe that he may have been talking about other things too, but he was definitely talking about Don Justo and Harry Westmoreland, both of them treasures in heaven.

–by Paul Darilek