The Smithsonian holds 155 million objects. About one percent is ever on view. Eric has spent this year inside a folder like that: his mother-in-law's portfolio of passports, birth certificates, and a wartime escape from Lithuania that nobody in the family talked about, until a citizenship law made every page matter. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. But the parable ends with the treasure still in the ground, and it never says what the man did next. Two temptations wait for him, and for us: forget it, or flaunt it. An older man afraid of outliving his wife, an old china cabinet, and a word coined in 1899 all point to a third option, in a verse most of us read right past.

From Matthew 13:44-46, 52.

Includes brief quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship and C. S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill