The Unseen Gift

There was once a man who was given a gift of untold worth.Yet, instead of looking inside the gift box, he became captivated by the pretty string and the colored box. He looked at the wonderful colors - red, blue, purple, gold and silver and said, "Wow, what amazing colors."
He looked and felt the texture of the box and the string. "It feels so soft," he said, "I'm happy just with the box and the string. Why do I have to waste my time to look inside?"
As the years passed by, the man never opened the box to see what was inside but instead spent all his time looking at the string and the box. In time, the box decayed, and moths ate the string. The gift inside remained unseen, shining its light for no one to see. All that was visible was the ugly box and moth-eaten string, both fading away. The gift is like a diamond in an ugly rock after a volcano eruption. Or fossils in muddy clay.
When the box and string became worse and completely lost their beauty, they were thrown away. The man had forgotten that there had been something inside. In many ways, we are like this. When we don't know what treasures we hold, we focus instead on imperfection. We do not see the perfect work of Christ in them.