Treasure Principle

So The Treasure Principle: Unlocking the Secret of Joyful Giving (Randy Alcorn) is an interesting book I've not read.

But I've now seen a manifestation of the principle one-and-a-half times. The first time was at a church we were attending in Southern California, but we left before the results. The second time was recently at work.

The idea was that you get a group of people to volunteer to come forward with almost no idea why. And then you had each of them $100. You ask them to pray over the money and then do something with it for God's kingdom.

And the stories you get back are just amazing.

So they recently did that at work and two of the stories were pretty cool and I thought I'd share.

Photo ©2009 Sam Cranston/Genesis Photos

The first guy was business-minded and a little curious. Last year, one of the NASCAR cars was wrapped with our logo by a benefactor who wanted to expose our name to a new audience. He was a big NASCAR fan and a big World Vision fan but didn't think enough NASCAR fans knew about World Vision. So he paid to have one of his cars run that year with our logo on it, instead of the usual sponsors he'd normally get paid to have on his car.

2009 1/64 Regan Smith #78

Well, we had some collectible die-casts made of the car to commemorate the year and they were selling them to the staff.  So he used a little of the money to buy one and put it on eBay just to see what would happen.  It quickly was bid way up by NASCAR fans and so he bought another and another and another.  They didn't say what the final amount he turned back over to World Vision was, but he suggested it could be a lucrative business.

Another guy got up and said he had no money to return, it was all spent.  And then he went on to tell a fascinating story.  The day before the money thing, his wife announced to him that she wanted to bake potatoes for homeless people and then drive around passing them out.  He was wondering how they might pull that off when the next day he was handed $100.

So he went home, told his wife, they decided they needed to do something bigger.  So they went down and talked to the guys who run our cafe.  It's run by a homeless shelter and the guys who work in our cafe were homeless at one time.  So they worked with them, recruited a bunch of co-workers and started doing "drive-by feedings."  They ended up doing a number of them, they'd just go somewhere, setup and start serving meals to the homeless where they were.  Even after their little experiment was over, the thing kept going.  It became so big on its own that the shelter now has to employ someone full time to coordinate all the future drive-by feedings.  Other homeless shelters even heard about it and three other shelters are now also doing them.

Thought that was pretty cool.