Redemption

From Ted

A friend called me from London and asked if I would consider presenting at a conference she was helping organize, called “Be the Change”.  She knew of our work and our book, “The Financial Wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge” that uses Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” to explain our perspective of how to help people change their destructive financial behaviors.

After quite an extended and engaging conversation, she asked if it would be possible to make my points during the presentation without mentioning the name of Scrooge, our book, or the Christmas Carol metaphor.

Somewhat taken aback, I thought, “Here I will be in London, the home of Charles Dickens, the source of much of his work, and they don’t want me to mention him at all? What’s that all about?”

So, I asked why.  She said “The people who will be attending are very informed, caring, evolved, involved people”, and finished that statement with an adamant “We are not Scrooges!!!”

My response was, “I know you, and if the people who will be attending the conference are anything like you, you are all in fact, very much Scrooge like.”

 

After a very long silence, she responded with a measured coldness that I had not encountered before, “What do you mean?” 

I said “You are very much like Scrooge, the Scrooge at the end of the story.” 

Another long silence and she said “I never thought of Scrooge that way.”

I went on to say that I saw the story of Scrooge as one of redemption and one that gave great hope for all of us no matter how old we were and how fixed we were in our ways.

Her initial reaction to the story of Scrooge is actually very common.  For some reason, very few people consider Scrooge to be an enviable man, yet by the end of the story he has become as good a person as can be imagined.

The moral of this story for me?  Redemption.  I ask for people to judge me on how I am today, rather than judge me for how I might have been in the past; in other words asking them to give me the gift of redemption.  I too am frequently challenged to give that gift to others who have hurt or betrayed me.