Beneath the Veil no.20 The Millionaire’s Lair

The second day there, she took us out to an expensive dinner and paid for everything. She wanted to go to the Venice Beach area and since she was driving, we all went. She parked us in front of a psychic bookstore and we went in. She flamboyantly insisted on paying for each of us to have an hour-long session with one of the psychics. Everyone was so impressed except for me. There was no way I was going to see a psychic. I had other ideas.

I walked down to a coffee shop and had a great time by myself and thought about what I’d just experienced. This woman was a millionaire but I could see right through her. She was lonely and not pleasant to be around. She only had friends because she had the money to pay for them. They talked about her behind her back, but if she offered to take them to dinner or anywhere else and pay for it, they went. And whatever philosophies she felt like expounding on, they listened and no one dared confront. It reminded me of dogs sniffing each other’s butts.  

God taught Solomon that most people would tend to listen to a rich person rather than a poor one, “The poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are no longer heeded” (Ecc 5:16). But God wanted Solomon to be smarter and He told him: “The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools” (Ecc 5:17). We have the ability to be wise like Solomon.

Paul tells the body of Christ we are to be “submitting ourselves one to another in the fear [respect] of God” (Eph 5:21). The “one another” has nothing to do with finances. We should be expecting God to speak to us through the people around us. He set it up that way, but if we aren’t looking for it we’ll miss it. If we respect each other as vitally important, we won’t miss what the Lord wants to teach us. We’re probably right in the place God wants us to be, or at least on our way there. It’s not like God doesn’t know where we are! He does and He has people around us that He can work in to get important messages to us.

I believe if we take our focus off the rich and famous and instead expect God to work mightily through ordinary people, we will see more of the extraordinary manifested in our everyday lives.

After escaping the millionaire’s lair, I received tremendous wise counsel from those around me, as well as from people I hadn’t communicated with in a long time. It turned into several months of tremendous discovery and appreciation for the “regular” people I know.

Love, Carolyn