Leslie Hindman has served as president of a premier auction firm. Yearly, Hindman auctioned millions of dollars of arts and home furnishings from estates of the wealthy. She would auction pieces of art selling for tens of thousands of dollars.

Hindman comments, "I see people fighting about their stuff all the time." She says, "You realize life is not about possessions."

Adrienne Fawcett, in the Chicago Tribune, wrote of Hindman: "A few experiences early in Hindman's career helped to cinch her disdain for material things." Fawcett tells, "Once she was hired to hold an auction in the modest home of a suburban family whose mother recently had died. As Hindman held court, the siblings bid against each other for their mother's humble possessions, scarcely exchanging a word."

Another time, Hindman found a lifetime of diaries in the apartment of a deceased woman who saved everything, but she had no children to whom to leave her things. Hindman tried to donate the diaries to historical societies. None wanted them. After a couple of years, Hindman threw them away.

What has Hindman learned from her experiences auctioning. She says, "So, I save absolutely nothing."

*Craig Brian Larson, Editor. Choice Contemporary Stories and Illustrations.

Jesus in our Luke text refers to Life. The Greek is zoe. "Life" here refers to spiritual Life, not merely bios, or physical being.

The rendition "measured" is a reading of the Greek "to be." The existence, the be-ing, of Life is not related in any way to things we claim to own, or possess.

Of course, this passage applies to all persons: for one can be as possessed by a little as by much. One can be greedy and poor, as well as greedy and rich. The greed is the same greed.

Thomas Merton reminds us of the fallacy of ownership, and the idolatry of greed:

The most wonderful thing about the world is that it is nobody's property, not even God's! We who are ruined by our own indigence to the point of thinking that we can possess something worship a false god, a god of possession, that is, a god of destruction. God is the God of the living.