Forty years ago, Today’s Reading paralyzed me. I had resigned from a tenured position to start a business. I wasn’t sure what that business would be, but knew that I had to escape working for a huge bureaucracy. My grandfather had died, and had kindly left me ten or twelve thousand dollars. That, with the money from my retirement fund, would get me started doing something.
The paralyzing passage, Today’s Reading, began with Matthew 19;23:
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich
to enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Again I say to you,
it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.”
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said,
“Who then can be saved?”
At the same time in my life that I decided, or was led, to start my business, I’d also decided to believe that the Gospel was Truth to be taken as literally as possible. The two life-changing decisions were contradictory. I wanted to become prosperous, but the Scripture I believed to be infallible was clear: If I became rich, I had no more chance of getting into Heaven than a camel had of going through the eye of a needle.
With a wife and children to support, and money running out, I had a serious problem.
“God,”, I said, “If a camel can’t go through the eye of a needle, I’m in big trouble!”
So, I tried to figure out how to put a camel through the eye of a needle. Various possibilities suggested themselves, but none concluded with both a camel that could walk and a needle with which a button could be sewn on a shirt.
When I admitted that my own mental abilities were not enough to solve the riddle, a thought that had to have come from a more powerful mind than mine presented itself:
“Take an egg from an ovulating female camel. Fertilize it, while it’s floating in amniotic fluid on a microscope slide, with a donation from a male camel. When the egg begins to divide, take a sterilized needle, and move it through the amniotic fluid on the slide. The egg will go through the needle’s eye as easily as a ping-pong ball through a basketball hoop. Then, put the fertilized egg back into the womb of the female camel.”
“So?”, I remember saying.
“When that camel is born, it will be a camel that has gone through the eye of a needle.”
The most bizarre passage in Scripture had, right in my own mind, come to make perfect, absolute sense in the physical world. Soon, I was led to start a business, which led to manufacturing suction cups.
That, in itself, was a miracle. Suction cups work because they contain, ideally, nothing at all when pushed onto a slick surface. The company I started after realizing that Scripture should often be taken literally became the world’s largest manufacturer of suction cups.
Now, between two and three hundred of my friends and neighbors have jobs making millions and millions of things, many of which work because they are designed to contain nothing at all.
