When my best boyhood friend Dennis and I were growing up, we used to take a city bus downtown to go to the movies. Our mothers always gave us money for the bus fare, for the movie ticket, and also EMERGENCY money – just in case. So off we would go to the movies, our pockets bulging with change.

One day, we decided to cut through the Woolworth’s store which was located nearby the movie theater. Lo and behold, there in the center of the store was the largest candy counter we’d ever seen! We stopped in our tracks, just gawking at the sight! And we were fingering the change in our pockets. Well, we succumbed to temptation that day and spent some of our “emergency” money on penny candy. When we got home, we told our mothers the movie cost more than we had thought!

This went on for some time. But it became more and more difficult to explain where the emergency money was going to. We lost it. We were mugged. We ran into a poor family who we bought tickets for to get into the movie. I think our mothers knew we were spending the emergency money, but they never said a word. They just let us lie and punch our ticket to damnation.

Dennis and I thought this was so cool! And each time we went through Woolworth’s we got the nerve to up the ante and spend even more money on penny candy. We’d go into the movie theater with great big bags of goodies. We thought we had it all…

…until the day we walked through Kresge’s instead of Woolworth’s.

And saw the goldfish!

Why, do you know that you can buy a goldfish for about what you pay for a bag of penny candy? Dennis looked at me and I looked at him. The next thing I knew, we were sitting in the movie theater, each of us holding a little plastic bag filled with water, and a goldfish in it! Other kids looked at us like we must be the richest guys in all the world, having our own goldfish in a plastic bag!

Well, we carried our goldfish with us on the bus back home.

Now there are two lessons that come from this caper. One is about how NOT to live your life, and the other is about how TO live your life.

Here’s the first: some of us are never content with what we got from Woolworth’s and spend our whole lives looking for Kresge’s. What we have is never enough. And that is a very sad and destructive way to live. God wants us to find contentment in the simple necessities of life!

Here’s the second lesson: use your resources to invest in things that really matter – like righteousness, justice, love, peace and healing. In other words, don’t settle for penny candy when you can have goldfish instead!