Last night I was holed in a practice room, my haven place of late, my Bible opened to Luke and my eyes falling on this verse:

As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple
treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "I
tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the
others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of
her poverty put in all she had to live on." Luke 21.1-4

And the last three pages of this year's journal filled quickly with questions about why? Why is the Kingdom built more expedientially when we give out of nothingness? Yesterday in chapel the speaker spoke about a peerless Kingdom--one in which the principles that work for the kingdoms of the world cannot work for the kingdom of heaven because we are made to be different. On the way to church last night I listened to an old sermon tape from home, about sowing and reaping, about the continuance of sowing, even when there seems to be no return.

Logistically, continual sowing, yielding no return, affords poverty. And this woman, the woman Jesus commended to his people, was still sowing, even into her poverty. Why? Why were we created to walk out this life in the habit of sowing, without a return, trusting that the return can be Jesus and nothing more? This woman wasn't only a minority already, as a woman in that culture, but she was a widow, a poor widow, in poverty---and, which is more than all of that, she gave all that she had to live on.

I read a passage of Oswald Chambers to a friend the other day; I can't remember it exactly, but basically it said that we have been saved from hell and eternal damnation and we quibble over the mere sacrifices God requires of us? Let it not be so! Let us be in a place where all that we have to live on is Jesus and He is more than we deserve.