Paying the price - 1/2

When you are born to be a wheeler-and-dealer, it really hurts to have to pay the full retail price for something.

A natural trader-from-hell trader-at-heart, I am always looking for a deal; a way to trade something that I have, or that I can create, for something that I need or want. This approach to business opens amazing doors of opportunity as people suddenly move from trying to sell you something, to working with you to achieve more from the transaction.

But there’s also a downside to this approach . . . You don’t always get the best.

In 2007 I employed a General Manager to run some of the various businesses that I’ve established, and he has a delightful tendency to spend my money! Now don’t get me wrong, there isn’t any tension between us over it, even though it is disconcerting to see the overdraft creep up, especially when I wouldn’t have spent that money myself.

Some of the things he is spending money on have improved our position quite nicely, and you would have to say it’s money well spent. We’ve got what we payed for and that is cool, so I’ve just gotta learn to put my natural horse-trader thinking aside and pay the price.

It really is a matter of getting what you pay for. If you want the best, you’ve just got to pay for it.

There’s always a price to pay. It doesn’t matter what the subject.

I spend a lot of time (proportionally) going back to what I reckon is the best book in the Good Book, Genesis. This book covers the basics really well, and sets the scene for understanding so much about life on earth. It’s the foundation really. Yes I know that Christianity always goes on about Jesus and how He came to save us, and all that stuff. That’s all fine, but it’s when we go back to the foundation that we can properly understand the context in which we live, and in which He came to do His “Saviour thing”.

One of the scariest passages is the one where God confronts Adam and Eve. It is simply the biggest “Oh, shit darn!” moments in the Bible. (There’s also another one in Revelation when we too will have to “face our maker” and will be found to have come up short, but Adam and Eve’s screw up has to take the cake in my book).

Here is the passage, jam-packed with interesting interactions:

Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 3:11a-24

Now the guts of this is that Adam and Eve got it all wrong - big time.

The Lord said that if they “bought” the fruit, then they would “pay the price” and being God, true to His word, that’s exactly what happened. They thought they could get away with it but they couldn’t. God effectively punished them, but only to the price that He had set previously, so it was all fair.

We’re paying the price right up until today, with tension, strife, pain, suffering, sin and death all around the world. It’s not all bad though. I’m pleased that God being the loving Father that He is, also provided clothing and protection for Adam and Eve. He does the same for us today if we choose it.

Oh, how I wish these guys hadn’t bought the lie from the devil back then, but they did, so there is a price to pay.

It’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to pay the price, because it’s the right thing to do, and sometimes we simply have no choice in the matter.