In the closing years of the nineteenth century the Cherry Sisters performed to packed theatres throughout the American Midwest. Their fame came from them being unbelievably bad actors that people came to throw vegetables at. Amazingly, the girls were then offered a thousand dollars a week to perform on Broadway – not because they were so good, but because they were so unbelievably bad. And seven years later, after they had earned a respectable fortune, they retired from the stage and went back to the farm, convinced that they had been God’s gift to the American theatre, when the truth was they had actually been a freak show.
It reminds us that the final assessment of our lives will rest not on how much money we’ve made but rather on what God thinks about the real worth of what we did with what we’ve been given.