Her childhood treasures were pristine. And then they became truly sacred

I had been waiting for years to reclaim my treasures.

They’d been sitting quietly in boxes in my parents’ garage through college, and then graduate school, and then my first job. There were too many of them to ship, and they weren’t needed. Not yet.

It wasn’t until we moved back to the Pacific Northwest, within driving distance of my hometown, that I could be reunited with the wealth of my childhood.

When we arrived, I pulled the box from my parents’ garage. It was dusty, but the contents were intact. Twenty-four nearly pristine toy cars from the Chevron gas station down the road from my house, in every color of the rainbow and in every model that the toymaker had made: trucks, muscle cars, a police car, a taxi, a limousine. Each of their names carefully inscribed on my heart, not a single scratch on any of them.

To another grownup, they might not have looked like much, but to me, they were a great fortune.

My treasures.

The cars weren’t for me, however — not anymore. While I had been waiting for them, my old toys had been waiting for someone else: two tiny girls with peanut butter-and-jelly fingers and very little hand-eye coordination. And for all of their friends, even the ones with a penchant for dropping things from great heights.

As I’d hoped, the cars have been a huge hit with my children. And, as I’d once feared, they are now covered in scratches.

The music box doesn’t work on the ice cream truck the way it used to. There is applesauce on everything. But look past all that and you’ll see that these toys are more special and more important than they’ve ever been. The joy that they’ve brought my little girls has made them far more sacred than they were when they were mine alone.

My daughters and their friends took my gift, and multiplied it.

The great Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero wrote that we are not born — nor do we live — for ourselves alone. We are also made for the building up of others. For the health of the earth. For the success of future generations.

The same can be said of the things we treasure — such things are better shared. When we reinvest all that we have received, in our community and especially in our children, the gift grows and grows. And we get the satisfaction of knowing our hard work and our joy will be multiplied — we might even be lucky enough to live to see it!

Your greatest wealth may be a few old toys, lovingly cared for all these years. It may be a vast fortune. It may be that fascinating bit of gray matter between your ears. Whatever you have received, whatever you have earned or grown or discovered, don’t bury it. Don’t hide it away.

Let God do greater things with your gifts and your goodness than you ever thought possible. Let your life be a treasure that puts a smile on the faces of the next generation.

This story was originally published September 6, 2018 at 5:55 PM.