It was a beautiful spring morning in downtown Columbia, where I often go for a morning cup of coffee. I was walking up Ninth Street with my usual paper cup filled with a dark single-origin roast when this beautiful car pulled up. Well, beautiful to me.
It was a sport trim from a luxury brand, completely blacked out with a matte finish, tinted windows, 20-inch black rims, and not a single speck of chrome. As it came to a stop, I began to admire some of the finer details, starting to do the math in my head, thinking, “Oh, that’s 70 grand, easy.”
The driver steps out. Tracksuit and tattoos stretching from their neck down. Before I could even recognize what I was doing, a thought fired in my head: “Man, I wonder what that guy does.” That was my actual thought about a total stranger at eight in the morning over a car, and I’d love to tell you that was a fluke, but it wasn’t. That same reflex has been running as a script in my mind for far too long.
The question I’ll often ask when I meet somebody for the first time is, “So, what do you do?” That often leads to a discussion about schools, degrees, and maybe subdivisions, all while I’m looking at a watch, a pair of shoes, maybe even trying to figure out what they drive.
We can sum each other up rather quickly, and we often do it in a pretty narrow way. It’s based primarily on appearance to determine their financial standing. And I know I’m not alone in this.
I think Jesus said something about this reflex better than anyone I’ve ever come across: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Now, there’s a lot to unpack in that statement, but it speaks directly to my snap judgment on Ninth Street. Maybe that wasn’t so random. Maybe that moment was telling me exactly where my treasure has been.
Jesus said something else even more challenging: You can’t serve both money and God. The word he used for money in his ancient context meant more than just the physical currency. It meant the stuff that money buys, and he didn’t speak of it so much as a resource as a controlling master.
Nobody taught me how to appraise strangers by their vehicles or to secretly question how much somebody makes during a conversation about where they work. The habit just grew quietly over years of my treasuring the wrong things. My heart has been trained over the years to see things in a certain way. Maybe wealth wasn’t the real problem. Maybe the problem is what I’ve let it measure.
What do you do with a heart that’s been trained wrong? As a wise man once told me, “You retrain it.” If the heart follows the treasure, that means it also follows when the treasure is given up. Give some of it away for no purpose to somebody who can’t return the favor. I’ve noticed that doing this starts to retrain my heart and loosen my grip. I know a guy who refuses to buy anything he isn’t willing to hand to a person who needs it.
I haven’t managed that rule yet, but I have started to notice something. If I want to stop making split-second appraisals of strangers and sizing up people in conversations, generosity helps.
