Are you familiar with the parable of the Rich Fool? It’s found in Luke 18. Here’s the story Jesus told.

The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

I felt a little (or a lot) like this guy last week as Beth and I were preparing for our garage sale. I have a small hall closet that I kept all my winter comfortable clothes in, mainly sweats. For quite a while, I have had to just stuff my clothes into it and shut the door really hard to make sure it didn’t pop open. I chose half of it to get rid of, and this is the resulting box and pile that I ended up with, from half of my small hall closet.

I thought that large box would have been adequate, but as you can see, it wasn’t. Much of this stuff had only been worn a couple times. And it’s been sitting in my closet for years. And I just kept collecting more, and more. Then I went to my main closet where all my regular clothes were. Here’s the pile to decided to get rid of from that closet.

Again, many of these shirts had been worn only 1 or 2 times and some never. I had many “like new” pants that I haven’t been able to wear in 10 years. We sold the nice shirts & pants for $2 each, and everything else for $1, and still had a lot left over at the end of the day. I took everything left over down to Soul’s Harbor and donated them.

Sometimes I wonder, if Jesus walked the earth today, and went around telling 21st century parables, would I be a the subject of a parable? Would people years from now read a story about me called the Greedy Fool? I wonder.