“To whom will you compare me, or who is my equal? ” asks the Holy One. Isaiah 40:25
People who work with teenagers are always looking for activities that will capture young people’s imaginations. For more than six years, my late wife and I worked with high-school kids, and there was always a shortage of good ideas.
One afternoon in a staff meeting, a colleague of mine suggested an activity that was sure-fire. “I’ve got a game your kids will love,” he confidently announced. I was all ears. In a few weeks we tried this guaranteed winner, and thankfully, he was right. The game was called “The Bigger and Better Scavenger Hunt.” I divided the fifty kids who had come to a meeting into four teams. I asked them to choose a leader, and then I gave a shiny new penny to each of the leaders. The instructions were simple: “Starting with this penny, go from door to door. Give the people who answer the door what you have in exchange for something that is bigger and better. Then take what you have and go to the next house, asking for something bigger and better.” I told them to be back in an hour.
Sixty minutes later, the four teams returned. One was carrying an old ping-pong table. Another group was sporting a lawn mower. The winning team came back to home base, pushing an old car down the street! In one hour, these clever and persuasive kids had transformed one cent into an automobile. Incredible.
When you and I were born, God blessed us with gifts and talents. And to one degree or another, our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our supervisors, and our friends challenged us to take these abilities and trade them up. “You’ve got a lifetime,” they seemed to say, “to take these things and exchange them, one at a time, for bigger and better things.” So we took our shiny penny and dashed into life, hoping to win the prize for the biggest and the best.
Isaiah never played “The Bigger and Better” game, but his understanding of the principle was flawless. “If you want God,” he seemed to be saying, “you’re not going to be able to trade up for Him. He is thoroughly incomparable to anything.”
The step of faith from what we can hold in our hands to the Holy One whom we cannot hold or see is not a step at all; it’s an impossible leap. But Isaiah’s message was clear. We can move through life, trading raw talent into wood, then into silver, and finally to gold, but these accomplishments will someday vanish like the sawdust on our garage floor—here today, gone with a sudden puff of air.
Submitting our lives into the hands of our faithful heavenly Father brings more pleasure than anything we could ever trade for. Acknowledging our inability to ever reach His presence by our own efforts but inviting Him into our hearts brings incredible wholeness and purpose to life.
Turning a shiny penny into an automobile in sixty minutes is no small task. Look around at your things. Amazingly, you have done this yourself. Unfortunately, it will never be enough, even if your youth director gives you more than the allotted sixty minutes. God’s presence and peace cannot be achieved by human effort. He will never be traded for. Nothing you have is good enough except your faith to believe in Him.