Photos of Salem Chapel

I search eBay on the off-chance of locating historical memorabilia connected to Salem Chapel. Occasionally, something turns up, but mainly not. What I have found more frequently are professional photographers offering their wares, of the various places to which they have been, including our chapel. For £70 (plus £7.99 p&p), one may purchase an A1-sized photo of Martin Top, though the price declines proportionate to the size. It made me smile, that an object we see each week (or several times a week) for free, is something that others further afield are prepared to pay for (assuming anyone would actually buy it). Are these potential buyers from the US of A researching family trees which lead them back to the Old Country? Are they thought to be suitable presents for retiring ministers (and no, I haven’t any plans)? A sight, which we at Martin Top take for granted, could be worth many pounds to someone else.

All this reminded me of ‘Dives’, the rich man of Luke 16. In hell, he longed for just a drop of water to be placed upon his tongue. Today, we bathe in the stuff, and complain when too much of it falls from above or its gaseous form bedarkens a blue sky. To the parched denizens of hell, however, a single drop is worth more than a mountain of gold.

The people of the world think little of Christians. In many places, we are a persecuted minority, easy targets for malicious bully-boys and provincial penpushers. In the West, we are deemed either old fashioned relics of a former age, or intolerant disrupters resisting the new orthodoxy. Yet in eternity, the gospel’s haters, rejecters and neglecters will envy even the crumbs of grace from our tables of truth. Like a man who buys a field not knowing that there is a gold seam beneath it, or a woman who inherits grandma’s cottage to discover she had an Old Master hanging above her fireplace, the Christian today does not know how immensely wealthy he is, and the unbeliever does not recognise how utterly destitute and bankrupted he is going to be.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. Matthew 13:45-47