Shelburne faith column: Death makes some people greedy
You’re getting old if you remember when bouquets of flowers were hung on the door of any home where someone had just died. Almost overnight those floral tributes had to stop. The bad boys in town learned that the flower-marked houses would be vacant while the survivors were planning the funeral or attending it. Those empty houses were a perfect target for looting.
Now undertakers are warning us that crooks have found another way to steal from grieving families. Scammers now are reading obituaries to identify victims who might be vulnerable to their treachery. Then, pretending to be the funeral home staff, they call the mourners and tell them their loved one’s body can’t be processed unless they immediately show up at some specified place and pay a sizeable sum of cash.
In this age of scams, I suppose this should not surprise us. Most of us get scam calls every day. Thieves pretending to be court officials or sheriff deputies or big-name credit card companies hope they can scare us into handing them our hardearned dollars. Hopefully, most of us have become wary enough not to answer those calls.
It seems to me, though, that we have reached a new low when these lying scallawags decide to fleece their neighbors right when they have just lost a spouse or a child or a parent. Right when their hearts are broken and their world is upside down. Not only are these crooks greedy. Worse than that, they are heartless.
But thieves are not the only folks activated by death. While death seems to make them even more dishonest, it seems to make some of us more greedy. Just this morning a colleague agonized to me about dealing with a family who were seething with anger and resentment because of the way a rich uncle’s estate was being divided among them. Over and over I have seen this happen. I’ve hurt as I watched families that had seemed to be okay with each other suddenly explode into a domestic war over dollars left on the table after death.
Death makes most of us weep. Losing a loved one overwhelms us with an array of emotions. But who would have thought that death could cause a person to covet?
Jesus got it right when he asked what good it would do if you got your hands on everything in the world but, as a result, lost your own soul.
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for almost four decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne faith column: Death makes some people greedy
