Hey Mister, what's in the picture?

This is a 100% totally true story:

Several years ago I was in Princeton, NJ participating in an antique show. The exhibitor across the aisle from me was a local dealer, a bachelor in his late 60s, who probably had the quickest, most acerbic wit I've ever seen.

Throughout the 3-day event his comments and observations, ususally delivered in a single sentence under his breath, kept me in tears from laughing so hard. The dealer's name was Thornton.

By mid-afternoon on Sunday it was pretty clear the public wasn't in much of a buying mood and most of the dealers had already began lowering their prices, rather than haul a full trailer home empty-handed.

Cutting prices 10% didn't help and within another hour you could practically hear falling prices hit the floor as dealers slashed their inventories to the bone ... some even willing to take a loss just to make one sale ... but the buyers didn't seem to notice or care.

Then around 3 PM Thornton motioned me over and said, "Watch this."

He pulled a small engraving from the wall and replaced the image inside with a crisp new $20 bill from his wallet. Then he wrote "$5.00" on the price sticker and re-hung the frame on his display.

Over the next two hours not a single person expressed interest or asked so much as one question. Thornton even tried switching into used-car-salesman mode, all but pressuring anyone walking by his booth to buy his $20 bill for five dollars.

But he couldn't convince even one soul to buy a perfectly legal $20 bill for $5. Not one person bothered taking a second look or mustered the nerve to ask, "Hey mister, what's in the picture?"

People assumed there must be a catch. Only there wasn't, and when the antique show closed Thornton took down the picture, chuckled and re-pocketed his twenty bucks.

Thornton told me later that night he'd pulled the same stunt many times over the years, just to remind himself that sometimes the public would rather walk away from free money rather than risk looking dumb by investing a few moments of their time to check out a deal that seems too good to be true.

True story.

Here's another 100% absolutely true story: there were empty seats in the auditorium last Sunday.

Around 7:15 I was in the atrium thinking about the reasons why.

Every empty seat I saw represented a person who either didn't want to risk looking dumb, or someone who thought their time was too valuable, to bother checking out the most amazing deal on the planet.

They weren't interested in finding out or learning about what was in the picture.

If one of those seats had your name on it here's a very small and thoroughly incomplete recap of only a tiny part of what you missed:

-The Holy Spirit changing peoples' lives
-The amazing last message in the DOND series (tense is ... good!)
-Seeing God work throughout our community (awesome)
-Finding out how foreign missions will be impacted by our church (huge)
-Finding out why children have started dragging their parents to church (true)
-The incredible 'noise we make on garbage cans' (more please)

In short, you missed seeing what's in the big picture.

But unlike Thornton, God didn't re-pocket His deal and go home chuckling at the end of the service.

Click here for directions and come see for yourself this Sunday- with services at 9:30 AM, 11:15 AM and 6:00 PM. (John Maxwell's gonna be there)
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Disclaimer: I am not a staff member of NSC nor has NSC authorized me in any way to express any opinions or viewpoints on their behalf. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own and I accept full responsibility for errors, oversights, inaccuracies and omissions.