Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

So I may have told you before a story. An old, I don't know, I think it might be a Muslim story,

it might be Buddhist. I don't really know. It's a famous old story and it should be

universal. And it's a story of a man who sits on a box every day and begs for money to make his

living. He's poor. He's damaged. He's disfigured. There's nothing right about this man's life. And he just

sits on his little box and begs for alms.

And one day a wise man comes, a teacher.

And the man says, please, could you give me a little bit of whatever the currency is?

And he says, well, I'm sorry, I don't have any money for you.

But what's in your box?

What's in that box you're sitting on? And the man says,

this is just the box I sit on. This is like the only thing I have and it's just my box.

And the wise man says, well, I'm really curious. Could we look? So the guy gets up and they open the

box and it's full of gold and diamonds and rubies and emeralds and all sorts of money.

And the moral of the story is that we all carry within us,

thinking it's just the most ordinary drab, stupid thing in the world,

a being that is already enlightened, a thing of infinite treasure.

In the Bible, they call it the pearl of great price.

They call it that in Mormonism, too. It's the jewel at the heart of the lotus in

Buddhism. And we all carry it around with us all the time, although we don't recognize what we've

got. We think our lives suck, and they do suck, but it's because we're not looking at the

value that we already have within us. Okay, that's it for this week. Bye-bye. No, that's not it at all.

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