Building Bigger Barns

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully…” Luke 12:16

Religious tracts are not quite my forte, I prefer land tracts…big ones. But since it’s Lent, I dug around in my Bible looking for some clues God left lying around that might offer some direction out of this real estate mess. I came across this allegory of a rich man.

This particular fellow was surely a real estate tycoon. He had the good fortune to own land that was pretty productive. In fact, so productive it made him richer. He had so much he hardly knew what to do with it, so he consulted with himself---his first mistake---and concluded that he’d leverage his surplus, hit the bank up for a few more million and build some bigger barns in which to store his crops. Which he did. Mistake number two.

I once wanted to be a builder. Growing up in a small town there wasn’t much building going on. My granddaddy decided to build a few rental houses and I needed money, so I signed on. Fifty cents an hour for a fifteen year old were good wages in those days.

I showed up on my first day with my hammer. My daddy called me aside and told me I had to start at the bottom, which meant the only building I was going to do was digging the foundations. My tools were rudimentary, invented by Fred Flintstone: a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Not only that, but I was to mix the mortar and tote the cinder blocks. “It’ll make a man out of you, son, build big biceps,” I remember him saying.

Big biceps, become a man…ah, magic words to a teenager trying to impress the girls. So I worked like a dog. Every night I measured my biceps. I saw little improvement. I confronted him with the lie. “Come by the store tomorrow, son, I have just the job for you,” he said.

Big mistake. “Son, take Jim and Felix and the flat bed truck down to the box car and unload it and put it into the warehouse,” he ordered. “What?” I asked. “You’ll see,” he said. Have you any clue how hot it is in August in an airless box car unloading bags of mortar and cement? Mortar weights 50 pounds, cement 95. Twice…boxcar to truck, truck to warehouse. Skeletons had bigger biceps than mine!

If this was what building was about, I wanted no part of it. “Don’t give up, son,” daddy said. “Go finish the job on our new house.” The job? Digging a 150 foot ditch to the street to hook up the sewer. The final straw. I dug that ditch in the broiling hot sun (biceps never bulged, but I got a good tan!). My daddy never liked it and cursed me. It was 4 feet deep and 12 inches wide, and he had to lie on his belly installing the sewer pipe. Ah, sweet revenge!

But manual labor broke my interest in the building business. And probably saved my life years later. I learned that one could do more mischief with a loaded ball point pen than a shovel. Land speculation came natural! Besides, I learned later that bank accounts attracted more girls than big biceps.

But back to our lucky rich guy with his barns. His luck became a curse…he simply had too much. He forgot the rule that nature only lends, never gives. His final mistake was thinking he could have his cake and eat it too. His lifestyle changed, new friends, more camels, condos on the Mediterranean, a younger wives and plenty of food and drink to go with it. But his loan came due…they always do!

Who can forget the scene in the movie, Cool Hand Luke, when Luke dug a giant hole in the warden’s yard, then had to fill it back up. Digging adjusts attitudes! Which could be interpreted today as an allegory. We’ve dug ourselves into some deep holes of debt in this country, and built a lot of bigger barns. Many stand vacant, stark testimony of greed…the land ceased producing.

Too much surplus has left us with a huge hangover. Like our rich man, we seem to have lost our collective soul in the blind pursuit of wealth. Common sense has always spoken, “If you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.” We find it hard to do!

What clues did God leave lying around? Read it for yourself. But, fellow Americans, charity needs no barns…let’s give some away. The barn building program can wait!

Bud Hearn
March 11, 2010