Precious (a Romania story)

Some moments burn into my memory with the depth of realizing something… like why we place a high value on certain things.

It was day eight of our ten days on the outreach in Romania. We were back in Pitesti after being in the villages and we had just led much of a Wednesday night prayer meeting at the church. There were about 20 people there, in addition to our team. After the service, one of the ladies in the church, a dentist, gave us each a beaded bracelet in the colors of a wordless book: black (sin), red (Jesus’ blood), white (forgiveness), blue (righteousness or the Holy Spirit), green (growth), and gold (heaven).

I’ve seen such bracelets before… usually made for children with cheap plastic beads and easily discarded … but this bracelet was more beautiful than the usual kind.

(unfortunately, I did not pick a sunny day to photograph this)

One of the girls noticed how sparkly the beads were and asked if they were crystals.

Yes, the woman said, they were Swarovski crystals. We all recognized the name as something valuable and began to look at the bracelets differently, thanking her more and putting them on with more honor than we would have given the plastic variety. She noticed – and what she said has stayed in my mind ever since:

It is precious – but not because of the value of the crystals. The value of the bracelet is in what it represents: Christ’s sacrifice to bring us into right relationship with God.

The value (and the cost) of that sacrifice is beyond our understanding.

I was humbled to realize how much stock I put in the value of something material… as if that value could increase the honor or beauty of what it represented. On the contrary, the high value of the materials should serve as a reflection of how valuable the message of the gospel is.

It struck me later when I observed the way prisms spilled out from the bracelet onto everything around in the bright daylight that that we should also be like that – allowing God’s light to pass through us and create something beautiful.