In order to finance the beginnings of Temple University, Pastor Russel Conwell gave one speech over six thousand times. He was a great story teller, and the speech survives online and in many print versions.
It contains the story of how a man sold his property in search of gold to another man who set up a saw mill, and discovered gold, the very gold that set off the famous gold rush of 1849.
There’s also the story of the man in Titusville, Pennsylvania, who sold his farm for $833 in order to move to Canada to work in the coal oil business. That property was in Crawford County, which became the birthplace of the American oil industry in the 1850’s.
Then he tells the story of the professor of geology and mining in Massachusetts, who sold his farm and moved to Wisconsin, where silver had been discovered. The next farmer discovered a block of native silver in a stone wall which the professor had walked past for years. There was much more where that came from.
I won’t spoil the story about the diamonds, but encourage you to read it for yourself. It is a reminder that great opportunities and resources may lie undiscovered and unappreciated right under our noses. It’s a great lesson for our day in which many unemployed people will need to retool and many entrepreneurs will be forced into other ventures.
Before we sell the farm and go searching for something exotic far away, it’s wise to look around us, like the man in Jesus’ parable, who purchases the field with a treasure already in it!
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field,
which a man found and covered up.
Then in his joy he goes and sells all he has and buys that field.”
Matthew 13:44