They found her body in a single bed in a bare, one room apartment over a store in downtown Palm Beach Florida. She had starved to death. Open cans proved that her last meals had consisted of a cheap brand of dog food… Sad story. What made the story even more sad was that she had more than twenty million dollars in assets at her disposal.
I was in my last year of High School and I was driving a delivery vehicle for Lewis Pharmacy in Palm Beach when the story broke. Few people even knew her name, although some of the older ones remembered her from a long time ago. The story is fascinating.
It turned out that it had had a fairy tale beginning. She was from a middle class family, not poor but certainly not wealthy. In College she had met Prince Charming and they had fallen in love. Soon after graduation, they were married. He was the heir to an untold fortune. They bought a mansion in Palm Beach, staffed with servants, gardeners, butlers and chauffeurs.
Before she could even get pregnant, he was killed in a tragic accident. Widowed and childless, she faced the future alone. One of the last things he had done, before his death, was to write out a generous household budget for her to follow. Somehow, that paper had come to rule her life. Generous the day it was written, more than fifty years of inflation had made it impossible to live on. She had let the servants go, then she sold the mansion and moved into an apartment. Now, almost sixty years after her husband’s untimely death, she had eaten her last meal out of a can of dog food and starved to death.
I was thinking about that this morning… I have no idea what brought it suddenly to the front of my mind. How foolish to eat dogfood and die of starvation with a vast fortune at your disposal. And yet, we, as Christians, with all the power of Heaven available to us, choose to live defeated lives, never using the resources available to us…
Think about it…
David…
End Time Thinker 