When we moved to Fort Worth, we bought a house with a swimming pool in the back yard. We bought it both because we like to swim, and because we knew that our grandchildren would really like to swim. We called it “grandchildren bait”. It is not deep enough for diving, but just right for cooling off.

Eventually we needed to have the pool re-plastered and re-tiled. The crew that arrived to do the work was friendly and efficient. One day I asked Peter, one of the crew leaders, if he had a pool at his home. “No,” he said. “I’d love to have one, but I could never afford a pool like this.”

I was hit with regret. Peter was highly skilled and very conscientious. He was good with his people and the project went smoothly. I thought that if anyone deserved a pool, it was Peter and his family; and I recalled how much the pool had meant to us for the years of our daughter’s growing up.

Peter did not appear bitter, and maybe he was saving up to install a pool eventually, but I knew that a window had been opened to my own life in contrast to his. We can never really measure the blessings, material and spiritual, that have entered and even abide in our lives, until a stark comparison to the lives of others, who have not shared those blessings, brings home to us the simple reality.

The Bible addresses wealth in both the Old and New Testaments: “Do not wear yourself out to get rich; do not trust in your own cleverness. Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle.” (Proverbs 23:45)

Jesus says it this way: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) I don’t believe that owning a swimming pool will have to cost me my soul, but I’m happy that I met Peter the pool man, who put into perspective the privilege and the blessing that it is and has been for our family; and I was reminded by him not to envy others whose resources are greater than my own.

Thousands of years ago God knew that these pressures would challenge us. In the Tenth Commandment He says, “You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land . . . or anything that belongs to him.” Peter was a person who brought those words to life for me.

Love in Him,

Prue