A story of Human Frailty and True Worth.

A dude was exploring caves by the beach. In one of the rocky caves he found a crusty, partially rotted old canvas bag filled with a bunch of golf ball sized hardened clay balls. It was as though someone had rolled up clay into balls and left them out in the sun to bake hard.

Their smooth roundness intrigued the man, so he took the bag of clay balls and as he strolled along the surfs edge, he would throw a clay ball out into the ocean as far as he could.

He thought nothing little of it, until he dropped one of the clay balls on a rocky ledge  and it cracked open... inside, after wiping off the dust was a beautiful, sparkling precious stone.

Stoked, the man began breaking open the remaining clay balls on the rock ledge. Each contained a similar treasure! He found thousands of dollars worth of jewels in the 20 or so clay balls he had left. Then it struck him... he had been on the beach a long time. He had thrown maybe 50 or 60 of those clay balls into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have taken home tens of thousands, but he'd just thrown it away!

It’s like that with people. We look at someone, maybe even ourselves, and we see the external clay vessel. It doesn’t look like much from the outside. It isn’t always beautiful or sparkling, so we discount it.

We see some people as less important than someone more beautiful or stylish or well known or wealthy.
But, we have perhaps not taken the time to find the treasure hidden inside that person.

There is a treasure in each and every one of us! If we take the time to get to know another person, and if we ask God to show us that person in the way he sees them, then the clay begins to peel away and the brilliant gem begins to shine forth.

May we not come to the end of our lives and find out that we have thrown away a fortune in friendships because the gems were hidden in bits of clay. May we always see the people in our lives and our world as God sees them.