Billionaires have been in the news a lot lately.

Most recently, we saw Jeff Bezos lose $18 billion in a single day as the growth of Amazon slowed in a post pandemic world. Of course, another man’s drop is another man’s gain. As Facebook’s user numbers grew, the price of Meta stock jumped 19% and put a cool $11.5 billion in Mark Zuckerburg’s pocket.

Then there was Tesla founder Elon Musk making a $44 billion bid for Twitter.

I suspect we react with little empathy for Bezos as his net worth dropped below $170 billion. Meanwhile, Zuckerburg’s fortune grew to $76 billion.

But as I ponder those numbers, I can’t help but think of David Green, CEO and Founder of Hobby Lobby, and himself listed of Forbes’ wealthiest. In his book Giving It All Away, David tells the story of his mother Marie, a pastor’s wife. On her deathbed, she was held in her daughter’s arms when she perked up and said with excitement, “Do you see them? Do you see them?”

 “What, Mom?” her daughter asked.

Marie saw angels coming for her—to take her home to heaven.

A misty-eyed David tells the story now decades later with a simple punch line: “My mother was nothing in this world’s economy. But I know that any billionaire would trade places with her if God would send angels to bring them home.”

Bezos? Zuckerburg? Musk?

They would do well to receive a simple reminder of true wealth. Life does not consist of the amount of zeros behind our name but the faithfulness by which we’ve lived out our calling.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

Bill High

Bill is CEO & Founder of Vyne Legacy. He works with families to equip them with tools to build multigenerational legacies, and he teaches givers and financial advisers on transformational biblical generosity. He is the co-author with David Green of Giving It All Away and Getting It All Back Again: The Way of Living Generously.

Published June 13, 2022

Topics: Lessons with Bill

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