The Gold

Find the good; find the gold.

I saw a video recently where some guys were panning for gold in Alaska. They had been panning for several days and were beginning to give up hope. I saw pan after pan of mud, pebbles, and water.

Then one day, they found some gold.

And boy, did they rejoice. They were hooping and hollering and jumping.

The camera then focused on the pan. All I could see were rocks and mud.

Then the camera zoomed in, they moved a rock, and out of the mud, a sunbeam glanced off the gold in the pan.

I squinted. “What in the world?” I thought to myself.

I barely saw the gold. It was so small. It was almost microscopic.

It was smaller than a fingernail. No joke.

Did they go panning for that? Did they spend time and money searching for that? Yeah.

“There is more to be found,” they say.

Bear in mind that this was one flake of gold. It turns out that you can’t find gold bars in the river. A gold bar consists of refined gold flakes — a lot of them. The most sizeable gold flake ever discovered in a river was three ounces.

To find gold, you must sift through the dirt, mud, rocks, and running water.

And since it doesn’t come in bar form, or pre-stamped coins readily available for immediate use, you have to know what a gold flake looks like — size, color, etc.

They search for it with a trained eye. They look amongst all the things that they are NOT trying to find.

None of these men went to Alaska to look for mud. They didn’t want to find a regular rock. They weren’t searching for the coldest stream of water or the clearest.

They trudged through the wilderness to a remote region of Alaska to find gold.

And as I watched the ending of the video, I thought, “Why can’t I go to so much effort to find the “gold” in people? Everybody has some gold in them.”

It’s true. Everybody has a purpose and a plan in this life. Everybody has been placed here for a reason.

If these rugged ragamuffins can go through so much time, money, and effort to find the gold in a remote river, I can at least try to recognize the gold in people.

To find the “gold” in people, sometimes you have to sift through a lot of dirty, muddy mess and rocks before you find it.

Can you find the gold in someone? It’s harder to do.

It’s often hidden under the mud and rocks. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes effort.
If I’m honest, I don’t want to dig through someone else’s mud, so to speak, to find the gold in their lives.

I see bad. I see rocks. I see rushing water. I only see the results of years and years of sedimentation, where the dirt and flowing water have long since covered up the gold in their life.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the bad. Anybody can see that. And everybody does see it.
It doesn’t take a genius to notice the bad attitudes and the face that hasn’t smiled in years.

I could be the most aloof person in the world and still notice when someone is a tad on the cranky side.

But it takes a caring, loving, patient person to notice the gold. It takes someone who doesn’t give up easily. It takes someone who will unrelentingly be on the lookout with every interaction to uncover that tiny little flake of goodness in someone’s life.

It may take a while, but I believe every person born has some gold in their life.

Some horrible people have lived throughout history. They had gold lost to the deep, dark parts of life’s river. Something happened. No one looked, or they gave up looking.

But I want to be someone who will search for the good. And do so until I’m successful.

Would a national tragedy be prevented if we looked for gold one more time? We might even prevent a more personal tragedy if we reached through the murky waters to the gold underneath.

How can we change someone’s life if we look for gold only one more time?

Can we prevent another school shooting?
Could we be the ones to offer hope to a young person who feels like there is no hope for their life?

Could we be the ones to cause a change in that man or woman passing by us in the grocery store with our kind words or friendly smile?

Oh, you don’t think something like that could happen? Too much mud or too many rocks? Would you have to wade out to where you’re uncomfortable?

I want to look for the good — for the gold.

At the time of this writing, the price of gold is $1,926.38 per ounce. PER OUNCE.

A pound of gold is worth $22,372.00.

What is the worth of finding the “gold” in someone’s life?

It’s priceless.

And it’s worth a try.

to those who need to start panning for gold (myself included),
– Caleb

P.S.
I have read that people have dug gold nuggets up from the ground, which are larger and weigh more. But it’s still hard, back-breaking, dirty work, which is the point of this post.
Gold will not rise from underneath the ground and magically arrive at your front door with bells on.

You have to go searching for it.