In the days when I was a missionary in Brazil I once went to visit one of our church leaders. We hadn’t seen him for several Sundays. Friends told me he had inherited three hundred dollars, and he was constructing, by hand, a one-room house. When he gave me a tour of the project, it took about twenty seconds. I told him we’d missed him, that the church needed him back. He grew quiet and turned and looked at his house. His eyes were moist. “You’re right, Max,” he confessed. “I guess I got just too greedy.”
“Greedy?” I wanted to say, “You’re building a hut in a swamp and you call it greed?” But he was right. Greed is relative. Greed is not defined by what something costs; it is measured by what it costs you. If anything costs you your family, or your faith, the price is too high.
