Symbiotic Economics: Wealth 6 - Golden Seeds - Golden Talents
27/February/2008 06:20 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 9
PDF copy New window
Keeping in the tone of last week’s allegory theme of air and water to eternal riches, to complete the story, along with the seed of using air as an effective means of concentrating densities to stratify and remove specific density materials, came seeds of magic dust, or rather magic sand, and a powerful liquid elixir, unlike any other used in refining processes.
What needs to be specifically pointed out here, is these seeds all were external in their nature. Furthermore the returns will be based upon farming realities both in the Bible and in creation, up to a hundred fold increase.
The American dream today and specifically evangelical Christianity is a religion of the heart. To which most people will give a hearty amen. You hear almost continually, I want more heart knowledge rather than head knowledge. Like I am already so smart I don’t need to learn any more. While not spoken outwardly normally, is the thought that if I can just overcome the limitations of my natural body, I can live in a spiritual heaven here on earth. That ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is pure gnosticism, in a very childish, not child like performance.
“If you don’t agree with me, I’m going to my room and pout until you change your mind and come and rescue me and affirm my self esteem, and tell me what a good person I really am.”
So all of us raised in America during the last half of the 20th century and still alive today, are all to a certain extent, rich, spoiled, brats. What we all need is a little concentrating and refining to get to those true golden seeds and golden talents that we possess. But get this straight, those seeds and talents, including life itself are not yours, but gifts of the Almighty.
“You mean what is truly important is my relationship with Jesus?”
I suppose you are right, the question is just which Jesus you are talking about having a relationship: A = The Jesus of Islam, B = The Jesus of Mormonism, C = The Jesus of the gnostics, D =The Jesus who pitches for a baseball team down in the Dominican Republic and is thought to be a soon Cy Young award winner, E = Jesus the mystic, F =The Jesus of your own creation, G The Jesus of the Bible that saved you from your inherited and continual present sin and justifies you as righteous before a Holy God.
“So many choices, so little time, I really don’t know, aren’t they all but the baseball player one and the same? I suppose if I had to choose only one, I would choose the one that makes me feel good about myself and lets me share my faith with others.”
Well you still haven’t made a choice, all you have done is eliminate the one correct answer, which is G. Go back and turn on your God given brain and exercise some of that grey matter and see how the correct answer is different than what you feel. See if you can move from your world of insecure self delusion, into the real world of a God created and sustained universe.
To see if I can help you join the real world, let us look at our final Biblical wealth construct, The Parable of the Talents. When we first looked at these three scriptural wealth sections of the Bible, on January 22nd, gold was trading at about $890 per oz. Now just five weeks later on February 26th it is trading at about $950., a rise of $60 per oz. Therefore your inaction has thus far cost you $66,000 per talent.
“But I don’t have a talent of gold and if I did, I would keep it right there.”
In the current state of the world, burying a talent of gold or silver in the ground is probably a better investment than putting it in a bank, but the point is that is not using the God given common external world to help you convert any of your worldly money and riches into eternal wealth. In other words you are treating your current money like it is yours, that same yours that makes you want to have the wrong Jesus as your savior. That Jesus you want to serve is not the Jesus of the Bible, he is your warm fuzzy, basically limiting your growth to your own internal insecurities.
So let us play a little talent game. Take the date in which you were born and add up all the digits. So say you were born on this date in 1980. You would add 2 + 27 + 80 = 109. To make it interesting if those numbers total to a zero in the last digit you get one talent of gold, if they are an even number you get two talents, if they total an odd number you receive five talents of gold. Such as it is, my total adds up to zero and I get one talent which at our $950 per ounce times 1100 ounces per talent yields $1,045,000. If you received two talents, that equals $2,090,000. If you received five talents, as our illustrated person, you start with $5,225,000
So what are you going to do with all that, not money, not riches, but wealth.
I have done this a number of times as a class in Christian circles. The results are quite interesting.
First of all, since most of these people are conservative evangelicals they tithe their 10%. That means you give $104,500 per talent to your local church. So if you are one of the poor recipients like me you still a have $940,500 in increments. What next? Well they then pay off their short term debt. So lets us say to make it simple with the car payment and the credit cards it comes out to $40,500 leaving a total of $900,000. What next? Well why not pay off the house? Current home values in the United States have tanked in the last few months, now nationally just a bit over $200,000. So let us say you owe half that amount $100,000. so that leaves $800,000. To keep everything somewhat consistent in this example if you received two talents you now have $1,700,000 and with five talents you now have $4,500,000 of wealth left. Now what?
Here comes the great universal, “Duh?” Followed by, “I guess I would invest it in the stock market.”
Then comes the question, what stocks and why? Is that really just another way of putting it to interest with the bank, or another form of burying it in the ground? The goal is to double the money you were given, probably in relatively short order, not over a 30 year working career. Furthermore, there is no where in the rules to the game that said you could use the talents to pay off your own debts. It is not your money you are investing, it is God’s wealth.
“Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.”
That gives us an entirely different perspective. You just put about $150,000 of someone else’s money in your pocket to pay off your own self indulgent nature. Furthermore, your tithe assumes you go to a church the wealth provider approves. but you are really giving it away according to your perception of righteousness. That wealth provider is after all a hard man, not easily swayed by emotional arguments. Your actions are known as fraud, stealing, there is now a reservation pending for your long term visitation at the Hard Rock Hotel. Now which Jesus you selected at the beginning makes a real difference. Especially naturally when we all make the wrong choice, unless we take advantage of one of the golden seeds we were given and planted it in fertile soil.
What if that real Jesus says to you, “Listen you old goat, depart from me I never knew you.”
In case you didn’t know it, that verse is a paraphrase of the last verses of the talents parable (Matthew 25:29,30) and the entire context of the sheep and the goats discussion following in Matthew 25:31-46.
I suppose that a graceful investor in His and your potential wealth would allow you to collect a salary for your efforts. However, the righteous God requires more than just your best intentions, He demands results if you continually think your way is superior to His ways. To squander it on yourself first and then bury it in the ground or put it into a bank at interest is not what the Good Lord put you here to do. Even in greedy international business they do not give you a golden parachute before you produce anything.
“Have mercy Lord on me a sinner?”
Which Jesus is that you are begging now? Too late!
In a world where we like to believe there are no absolutes outside our own perceptions, it may seem strange to believe that you are not the source of your seeds and talents. Pretty much if left to your own devices most of the time you convert the external gifts you have been given into sanitary waste, not golden treasure.
So where should you invest the wealth of golden seeds and golden talents. Well to start with that 10% you invested in God’s work at the beginning was a start. It is estimated that Christians invest about two percent of their money to the church, really not all that different than true worldly people give to their charities and organizations.
So what would your local church do with your 10% talent gift, besides put you on the elder board, use it to pay off the mortgage, fund some other internal project, or put it in the bank? Not much different than what you would do personally, is it?
How about homes, schools, good water, waste treatment, and enterprise development in developing world countries?
“Oh you forgot evangelism?”
Sure enough I did, evangelism that taught you it is all right for you to be a self righteous gnostic glutton. I didn’t forget that, I left it out. Now if that money was invested in what the true Jesus did in time and space, both locally and abroad, and not what he would do in this world now, that is a different story. That however, is not part of the paradigm of post modern evangelicalism.
But say you do, by some miracle of God, go to such a church that truly does preach and teach the Christian good news gospel, centered upon the finished work of Jesus Christ in time and space, that should be a miracle that should allow you to give more than just 10%. I suppose they would have contacts or you could find other churches and ministires in the world who believed more in the absolute truth of what true Christianity has to offer over just another worldly religion, that would probably take another 10% so you are now down to that same amount you squandered on yourself.
“Why not give more than that?”
I think we are discussing that right now. People who are given more than they can handle expect they will be given more, because they are such nice people and even then they really waste the excess or don’t invest it wisely.
This was the end of the preliminary draft of this message. So now what? A few hundred more words this week, and then another article next week and this Symbiotic Economics series will be finished. Twenty three articles total. Maybe I’ll ad another to make it an even twenty four, perhaps a wrap up in the context of what is now happening rapidly in our world.
So what do all these articles mean in a Biblical Creation context? That God is gracious and wants none to perish eternally, but more to the point that your best life here and especially in eternity will come from principles of theology found in the Bible and principles of life found in the science of creation. In are present 21st century world, evil men and women have corrupted both revelations for their own personal use and means to worldly riches. That is reality.
There is a saying you have to hit a donkey across the head with a two by four to make him respond. The church preacher says “If they won’t accept grace, blast them law with both barrels.”
We are now in the middle of Lent, the season on the church calendar where Christians are supposed to be reflecting on what Jesus did and how little of that blessing and free gift do we really contemplate or even desire. Especially relevant in the portion on Symbiosis Economics and wealth is what Jesus did after His entry into Jerusalem after Palm Sunday.
Transposed into modern western culture “What would Jesus Do?” The same thing he did back then. Over throw the businesses of those, not making a living working in God’s temple, but those getting rich selling religion, changing money, and corrupting sincere honest people trying to serve and worship God. What he did then is no different than what He would do today.
Don’t expect that cleansing to occur within the church until the time that God begins to shake the earth and most of what passes for the Christian religion. It is weighed in the balance and found wanting, to use Daniel’s judgement of Babylon, for we do live in a metaphor of this evil city and time. By morning it was no more.
I would like Wonder Springs to be able to raise three million dollars to provide a foundation for future ministry in the form of Biblical creation teaching, but also what was once known as charity to those less fortunate materially. That money will be basically spent buying real estate and materials for those schools and to finish development of the gold and silver mining and refining equipment. It would then be the the majority stockholder in Wonder Springs Adventures Ltd. Furthermore it would be the positive actor when the God who created and sustains it all decided to claim that wealth He has deposited all over the world.
I get a reasonable salary, eventually, that paid for home, which is a very real desire of everyone in the world, and some stock in payment for my enterprise and equipment developmental labors.
To put this in the perspective of the parable of the talents. It can be done over time with the one talent indicated by my sum of zero in adding the digits of my birthday. It would be easier and quicker if two talents were available, for five talents it would just be putting the pieces together and making them work under the principles of Symbiotic Economics. At no time would any amount of money be the focus of burying wealth in the ground, but rather extracting it from the ground. Quite simple and straightforward.
We would like your help in doing that, but once that money is raised there should be no reason to ever bug you again. Hopefully, we can pay you dividends in portions of talents, perhaps in real gold, real wealth. Your real chance is now. Ergo, as pastors are so fond of saying, you shall get no gold star in heaven, for saying someday I will think about it, or any share of any precious metals the Lord may bless us, unless you buy it at market price.
I was reading an article by a gold investor earlier this week that said his forecast of $1650 an ounce for gold prices looked very much on the low side as this country approaches the next election. Nothing significant is going to be done about the debt that is devouring this country until after the election. Then that future depends upon who is elected.
So if you bought stock in Wonder Springs Adventures Ltd., how much would it be worth. We could take it public, but why bother. You would be really investing for the precious dividends in both golden seeds and golden talents. not just precious metals, but also what good works the Wonder Springs foundation could do in the world. What will be the economic status of that world, I will let you be the judge.
Some perspective, using the 1970s equipment, which I think we can improve upon significantly, the old gentleman, who owned the existing five air table plant, said he knew it could make money with $20 per ton rock, most of that cost occurred in extracting and milling the ore. That was when the price of gold was fluctuating around $300 and when cyanide heap leaching was the fad because it might possibly be able to break even with $60 - $70 rock on a $250 million investment. Now that is what you might call true leverage, based on real assets, not funny money.
Back then I could not raise the money to buy the plant, because all the potential investors I ran across were way too busy trying to get rich instead of wealthy. As a consequence by now I’m sure they might now have some money, but it is always just one deal away from having enough. The more things change the more they stay the same.
___________________________________________________________
As I awoke this morning, I realized I have missed something important and powerful. Not just in this episode but in the whole context of this Biblical Creation worldview, which in one way or another I have been working in all my life. In my scientific training it was so obvious it was overlooked, in Business Ecology the same, in mine and other’s Christian teaching, we have all missed it. We may have mentioned it in someway in passing, but we have never really grasped the depth of the concept. That overriding principle of a God created universe, that is not present in an evolving world worldview, is that everything matters. All matter matters. If that is true, all life matters more than matter matter, and human life matters the most. The Bible says, Let Us make man in Our Image.
I was sent back here to the suburbs of Nowhere because to God these people matter, even if they don’t add up to much in the eyes of the world. There are prophets in the world today that preach that message, both in and out of the church, but what they really miss is not the need for community, but the only glue that will hold together a community of those created in the image of God, is the God who created us.
Earlier I was talking about raising money, my big unsolved question was how to involve the little man or little woman, who has not the means to do what they would like for this ministry or for God. I fit that criteria also. The answer is do what you can. That preacher that says you will get a gold star in heaven, speaks an element of truth, but the reward of serving the living God is not getting and giving. The hard part is accepting, in the context of this message, the golden seeds and golden talents you were given at birth and are continually planted into your life for as long as you live. If we don’t pass them on they will wither and die and so will you, that is the truth of this present age.
For these last ten years I have written these articles. Over the years they have gotten longer and hopefully deeper. They are also designed not to make you feel all warm and complete inside. While they are designed to be easy to read, they are designed not to be that easy to follow. Some of it is the way my mind works, but a great deal of it is to change directions quickly, so that you have to stop for a pause and maybe figure out how in the world did he go from there to here. It has been called esoteric and obtuse, at least those were definitions I have been told, I’m sure there are others less flattering.
So do what you can to help us move beyond writing, into serving in a new and different way. I need to ask and you need to respond within your present life context. It matters to me and it matters to God, because the absolute truth of it all, is nothing would exist at all, except, before time began, God had the concept of “I wonder what would happen if?” In that context the ageless allegory has been written and we all have a truly unique part that matters greatly in the unfolding story.
We all are living unique personalities flowing from that great deep magic and mystery.
PDF copy New window
Keeping in the tone of last week’s allegory theme of air and water to eternal riches, to complete the story, along with the seed of using air as an effective means of concentrating densities to stratify and remove specific density materials, came seeds of magic dust, or rather magic sand, and a powerful liquid elixir, unlike any other used in refining processes.
What needs to be specifically pointed out here, is these seeds all were external in their nature. Furthermore the returns will be based upon farming realities both in the Bible and in creation, up to a hundred fold increase.
The American dream today and specifically evangelical Christianity is a religion of the heart. To which most people will give a hearty amen. You hear almost continually, I want more heart knowledge rather than head knowledge. Like I am already so smart I don’t need to learn any more. While not spoken outwardly normally, is the thought that if I can just overcome the limitations of my natural body, I can live in a spiritual heaven here on earth. That ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is pure gnosticism, in a very childish, not child like performance.
“If you don’t agree with me, I’m going to my room and pout until you change your mind and come and rescue me and affirm my self esteem, and tell me what a good person I really am.”
So all of us raised in America during the last half of the 20th century and still alive today, are all to a certain extent, rich, spoiled, brats. What we all need is a little concentrating and refining to get to those true golden seeds and golden talents that we possess. But get this straight, those seeds and talents, including life itself are not yours, but gifts of the Almighty.
“You mean what is truly important is my relationship with Jesus?”
I suppose you are right, the question is just which Jesus you are talking about having a relationship: A = The Jesus of Islam, B = The Jesus of Mormonism, C = The Jesus of the gnostics, D =The Jesus who pitches for a baseball team down in the Dominican Republic and is thought to be a soon Cy Young award winner, E = Jesus the mystic, F =The Jesus of your own creation, G The Jesus of the Bible that saved you from your inherited and continual present sin and justifies you as righteous before a Holy God.
“So many choices, so little time, I really don’t know, aren’t they all but the baseball player one and the same? I suppose if I had to choose only one, I would choose the one that makes me feel good about myself and lets me share my faith with others.”
Well you still haven’t made a choice, all you have done is eliminate the one correct answer, which is G. Go back and turn on your God given brain and exercise some of that grey matter and see how the correct answer is different than what you feel. See if you can move from your world of insecure self delusion, into the real world of a God created and sustained universe.
To see if I can help you join the real world, let us look at our final Biblical wealth construct, The Parable of the Talents. When we first looked at these three scriptural wealth sections of the Bible, on January 22nd, gold was trading at about $890 per oz. Now just five weeks later on February 26th it is trading at about $950., a rise of $60 per oz. Therefore your inaction has thus far cost you $66,000 per talent.
“But I don’t have a talent of gold and if I did, I would keep it right there.”
In the current state of the world, burying a talent of gold or silver in the ground is probably a better investment than putting it in a bank, but the point is that is not using the God given common external world to help you convert any of your worldly money and riches into eternal wealth. In other words you are treating your current money like it is yours, that same yours that makes you want to have the wrong Jesus as your savior. That Jesus you want to serve is not the Jesus of the Bible, he is your warm fuzzy, basically limiting your growth to your own internal insecurities.
So let us play a little talent game. Take the date in which you were born and add up all the digits. So say you were born on this date in 1980. You would add 2 + 27 + 80 = 109. To make it interesting if those numbers total to a zero in the last digit you get one talent of gold, if they are an even number you get two talents, if they total an odd number you receive five talents of gold. Such as it is, my total adds up to zero and I get one talent which at our $950 per ounce times 1100 ounces per talent yields $1,045,000. If you received two talents, that equals $2,090,000. If you received five talents, as our illustrated person, you start with $5,225,000
So what are you going to do with all that, not money, not riches, but wealth.
I have done this a number of times as a class in Christian circles. The results are quite interesting.
First of all, since most of these people are conservative evangelicals they tithe their 10%. That means you give $104,500 per talent to your local church. So if you are one of the poor recipients like me you still a have $940,500 in increments. What next? Well they then pay off their short term debt. So lets us say to make it simple with the car payment and the credit cards it comes out to $40,500 leaving a total of $900,000. What next? Well why not pay off the house? Current home values in the United States have tanked in the last few months, now nationally just a bit over $200,000. So let us say you owe half that amount $100,000. so that leaves $800,000. To keep everything somewhat consistent in this example if you received two talents you now have $1,700,000 and with five talents you now have $4,500,000 of wealth left. Now what?
Here comes the great universal, “Duh?” Followed by, “I guess I would invest it in the stock market.”
Then comes the question, what stocks and why? Is that really just another way of putting it to interest with the bank, or another form of burying it in the ground? The goal is to double the money you were given, probably in relatively short order, not over a 30 year working career. Furthermore, there is no where in the rules to the game that said you could use the talents to pay off your own debts. It is not your money you are investing, it is God’s wealth.
“Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.”
That gives us an entirely different perspective. You just put about $150,000 of someone else’s money in your pocket to pay off your own self indulgent nature. Furthermore, your tithe assumes you go to a church the wealth provider approves. but you are really giving it away according to your perception of righteousness. That wealth provider is after all a hard man, not easily swayed by emotional arguments. Your actions are known as fraud, stealing, there is now a reservation pending for your long term visitation at the Hard Rock Hotel. Now which Jesus you selected at the beginning makes a real difference. Especially naturally when we all make the wrong choice, unless we take advantage of one of the golden seeds we were given and planted it in fertile soil.
What if that real Jesus says to you, “Listen you old goat, depart from me I never knew you.”
In case you didn’t know it, that verse is a paraphrase of the last verses of the talents parable (Matthew 25:29,30) and the entire context of the sheep and the goats discussion following in Matthew 25:31-46.
I suppose that a graceful investor in His and your potential wealth would allow you to collect a salary for your efforts. However, the righteous God requires more than just your best intentions, He demands results if you continually think your way is superior to His ways. To squander it on yourself first and then bury it in the ground or put it into a bank at interest is not what the Good Lord put you here to do. Even in greedy international business they do not give you a golden parachute before you produce anything.
“Have mercy Lord on me a sinner?”
Which Jesus is that you are begging now? Too late!
In a world where we like to believe there are no absolutes outside our own perceptions, it may seem strange to believe that you are not the source of your seeds and talents. Pretty much if left to your own devices most of the time you convert the external gifts you have been given into sanitary waste, not golden treasure.
So where should you invest the wealth of golden seeds and golden talents. Well to start with that 10% you invested in God’s work at the beginning was a start. It is estimated that Christians invest about two percent of their money to the church, really not all that different than true worldly people give to their charities and organizations.
So what would your local church do with your 10% talent gift, besides put you on the elder board, use it to pay off the mortgage, fund some other internal project, or put it in the bank? Not much different than what you would do personally, is it?
How about homes, schools, good water, waste treatment, and enterprise development in developing world countries?
“Oh you forgot evangelism?”
Sure enough I did, evangelism that taught you it is all right for you to be a self righteous gnostic glutton. I didn’t forget that, I left it out. Now if that money was invested in what the true Jesus did in time and space, both locally and abroad, and not what he would do in this world now, that is a different story. That however, is not part of the paradigm of post modern evangelicalism.
But say you do, by some miracle of God, go to such a church that truly does preach and teach the Christian good news gospel, centered upon the finished work of Jesus Christ in time and space, that should be a miracle that should allow you to give more than just 10%. I suppose they would have contacts or you could find other churches and ministires in the world who believed more in the absolute truth of what true Christianity has to offer over just another worldly religion, that would probably take another 10% so you are now down to that same amount you squandered on yourself.
“Why not give more than that?”
I think we are discussing that right now. People who are given more than they can handle expect they will be given more, because they are such nice people and even then they really waste the excess or don’t invest it wisely.
This was the end of the preliminary draft of this message. So now what? A few hundred more words this week, and then another article next week and this Symbiotic Economics series will be finished. Twenty three articles total. Maybe I’ll ad another to make it an even twenty four, perhaps a wrap up in the context of what is now happening rapidly in our world.
So what do all these articles mean in a Biblical Creation context? That God is gracious and wants none to perish eternally, but more to the point that your best life here and especially in eternity will come from principles of theology found in the Bible and principles of life found in the science of creation. In are present 21st century world, evil men and women have corrupted both revelations for their own personal use and means to worldly riches. That is reality.
There is a saying you have to hit a donkey across the head with a two by four to make him respond. The church preacher says “If they won’t accept grace, blast them law with both barrels.”
We are now in the middle of Lent, the season on the church calendar where Christians are supposed to be reflecting on what Jesus did and how little of that blessing and free gift do we really contemplate or even desire. Especially relevant in the portion on Symbiosis Economics and wealth is what Jesus did after His entry into Jerusalem after Palm Sunday.
Transposed into modern western culture “What would Jesus Do?” The same thing he did back then. Over throw the businesses of those, not making a living working in God’s temple, but those getting rich selling religion, changing money, and corrupting sincere honest people trying to serve and worship God. What he did then is no different than what He would do today.
Don’t expect that cleansing to occur within the church until the time that God begins to shake the earth and most of what passes for the Christian religion. It is weighed in the balance and found wanting, to use Daniel’s judgement of Babylon, for we do live in a metaphor of this evil city and time. By morning it was no more.
I would like Wonder Springs to be able to raise three million dollars to provide a foundation for future ministry in the form of Biblical creation teaching, but also what was once known as charity to those less fortunate materially. That money will be basically spent buying real estate and materials for those schools and to finish development of the gold and silver mining and refining equipment. It would then be the the majority stockholder in Wonder Springs Adventures Ltd. Furthermore it would be the positive actor when the God who created and sustains it all decided to claim that wealth He has deposited all over the world.
I get a reasonable salary, eventually, that paid for home, which is a very real desire of everyone in the world, and some stock in payment for my enterprise and equipment developmental labors.
To put this in the perspective of the parable of the talents. It can be done over time with the one talent indicated by my sum of zero in adding the digits of my birthday. It would be easier and quicker if two talents were available, for five talents it would just be putting the pieces together and making them work under the principles of Symbiotic Economics. At no time would any amount of money be the focus of burying wealth in the ground, but rather extracting it from the ground. Quite simple and straightforward.
We would like your help in doing that, but once that money is raised there should be no reason to ever bug you again. Hopefully, we can pay you dividends in portions of talents, perhaps in real gold, real wealth. Your real chance is now. Ergo, as pastors are so fond of saying, you shall get no gold star in heaven, for saying someday I will think about it, or any share of any precious metals the Lord may bless us, unless you buy it at market price.
I was reading an article by a gold investor earlier this week that said his forecast of $1650 an ounce for gold prices looked very much on the low side as this country approaches the next election. Nothing significant is going to be done about the debt that is devouring this country until after the election. Then that future depends upon who is elected.
So if you bought stock in Wonder Springs Adventures Ltd., how much would it be worth. We could take it public, but why bother. You would be really investing for the precious dividends in both golden seeds and golden talents. not just precious metals, but also what good works the Wonder Springs foundation could do in the world. What will be the economic status of that world, I will let you be the judge.
Some perspective, using the 1970s equipment, which I think we can improve upon significantly, the old gentleman, who owned the existing five air table plant, said he knew it could make money with $20 per ton rock, most of that cost occurred in extracting and milling the ore. That was when the price of gold was fluctuating around $300 and when cyanide heap leaching was the fad because it might possibly be able to break even with $60 - $70 rock on a $250 million investment. Now that is what you might call true leverage, based on real assets, not funny money.
Back then I could not raise the money to buy the plant, because all the potential investors I ran across were way too busy trying to get rich instead of wealthy. As a consequence by now I’m sure they might now have some money, but it is always just one deal away from having enough. The more things change the more they stay the same.
___________________________________________________________
As I awoke this morning, I realized I have missed something important and powerful. Not just in this episode but in the whole context of this Biblical Creation worldview, which in one way or another I have been working in all my life. In my scientific training it was so obvious it was overlooked, in Business Ecology the same, in mine and other’s Christian teaching, we have all missed it. We may have mentioned it in someway in passing, but we have never really grasped the depth of the concept. That overriding principle of a God created universe, that is not present in an evolving world worldview, is that everything matters. All matter matters. If that is true, all life matters more than matter matter, and human life matters the most. The Bible says, Let Us make man in Our Image.
I was sent back here to the suburbs of Nowhere because to God these people matter, even if they don’t add up to much in the eyes of the world. There are prophets in the world today that preach that message, both in and out of the church, but what they really miss is not the need for community, but the only glue that will hold together a community of those created in the image of God, is the God who created us.
Earlier I was talking about raising money, my big unsolved question was how to involve the little man or little woman, who has not the means to do what they would like for this ministry or for God. I fit that criteria also. The answer is do what you can. That preacher that says you will get a gold star in heaven, speaks an element of truth, but the reward of serving the living God is not getting and giving. The hard part is accepting, in the context of this message, the golden seeds and golden talents you were given at birth and are continually planted into your life for as long as you live. If we don’t pass them on they will wither and die and so will you, that is the truth of this present age.
For these last ten years I have written these articles. Over the years they have gotten longer and hopefully deeper. They are also designed not to make you feel all warm and complete inside. While they are designed to be easy to read, they are designed not to be that easy to follow. Some of it is the way my mind works, but a great deal of it is to change directions quickly, so that you have to stop for a pause and maybe figure out how in the world did he go from there to here. It has been called esoteric and obtuse, at least those were definitions I have been told, I’m sure there are others less flattering.
So do what you can to help us move beyond writing, into serving in a new and different way. I need to ask and you need to respond within your present life context. It matters to me and it matters to God, because the absolute truth of it all, is nothing would exist at all, except, before time began, God had the concept of “I wonder what would happen if?” In that context the ageless allegory has been written and we all have a truly unique part that matters greatly in the unfolding story.
We all are living unique personalities flowing from that great deep magic and mystery.