Where your Treasure is

MEETING LIFE’S CHALLENGES 

‘Meeting life’s Challenges’ is an autobiography of Brooks Wilson’s life that invites us to meet him at four years of age and join his journey of life up until the current time of the writing of this book. We share the days of his early years as the son of Rob Wilson who was born in Mudgee NSW Australia and ‘Peg’ Wilson who was born in Massachusetts USA as Gertrude Brooks, the daughter of Clayton and Grace Brooks. And this Australian/American heritage of Brooks Wilson becomes a central feature of his life, which is grandly enhanced by his marriage in 1959 to Ann Meredith, a journalist from Springfield Ohio USA. 

These early years that tell of Brook’s comprehensive education, business training and career achievements are marked by his foundational Christian upbringing which defines his philosophy of life. In the preface to his book he draws from the Apostle Paul’s teaching about loving one another and in his own words he says ‘Life is not all about ‘us’. The key is to forget ‘self’ and reach out to others’. The heartbeat of this philosophy is steady throughout his book.

Brooks’ marriage to Ann, whom Brooks describes as ‘the centre of his life’ not only consolidated the Australian/American heritage but it also opened up a life of travel for Brooks and Ann that took them on a journey of adventure and discovery to many countries and regions and cultures. They had many interests in common, including their shared commitment to Christian values, and their journeys of travel together reflect both their shared appreciation of the cultural diversity and social interaction they experienced, along with a shared sense of purpose and mission of investing their care into the lives of everyone they were to meet, no matter where they were from or what they did for a living.

A striking example of how travel with meaning and purpose planted itself into their relationship leaps out of the book as Brooks describes some travel itineraries from the year of their wedding. If we could see the entry and exit visas on both their passports in one eventful week in 1959 we would see them stamped with New York, London, Switzerland, and back to London, topping it all off with Brooks proposing to Anne while they were flying over Paris at night, and Ann said ‘yes’ (Page 69).

Brooks takes us into his and Ann’s active family life with their children. We get to learn of their splendid achievements, sometimes against the odds, and their growing up and marrying and the arrival of grandchildren who likewise grow up to ‘Meet Life’s Challenges’, again sometimes against the odds. All of that flows into and out of a background of significant recent and present-day events where we meet heart-warmingly regular people and inspiringly noble and notable people such that we are made to feel at home with them on their pages, with the monochrome photos aiding the connection. The author’s style is straightforward and easy to read but as you catch the style you realize how energetically it moves the story along. He employs short, punchy sentences that get the reader into lively dialogue as if we were sitting around the table with himself and a host of other guests.

After the years of preparation in laying the foundation of discipline and study and applying the principles of life that he valued, Brooks Wilson starts to hit his straps and his potential becomes realized in a career of leadership that leads to countless areas of expression.
With his home base firmly settled in Australia and maintaining strong ties with the US Brooks begins working in Sydney with a company called Koppers USA and through this company he connects with two businessmen who had been at Harvard Business School where Brooks also studied. 
Brooks worked with these two men to set up a business arrangement between Koppers USA and BHP Australia, and Koppers Australia Pty Ltd was finally registered as a 50/50 joint venture with BHP. This Australian company was renamed KAP, with Brooks Wilson serving as Marketing manager in Sydney as his first appointment, and in time becoming Managing Director of this very profitable company and creating international trade links with many countries and regions in the Pacific, North America, the Middle East and Asia. 

The narrative of the company’s international trade hits a cracking pace in this section of the book as the author describes multiple meetings with heads of State in Australia and the USA and in China, with the China connection providing a good dose of intrigue in times of global headline events. One paragraph that sits modestly amongst the dealings with China describes what is called a ‘Compensation Trade Agreement’ and it reads ‘this was the first venture of any type to be agreed between an Australian and a Chinese company and worked for the mutual benefit of both companies’. Many of these impressive milestone events are backed up by citations in the appendices from various magazine and newspaper articles.

Towards the end of the book in the second last chapter Brooks Wilson rolls the story back into the 1800’s and features legendary family members who have wound their DNA into the personalities of the current generation of Wilsons, which makes this work a true chronicle that any family would treasure. But this book goes beyond the chronicle and legacy of past and present family history. The writing has been coiled to project a decisive challenge of how to face the future to all who read it. This book is not just for the extended Wilson family and their friends, it is a book to be offered to any person of any age who desires to know how to build a vision for their lives, and who would like to know what ingredients of character, and courage and compassion deserve to be taken in hand and given to their world.

Paul O’Sullivan

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/meeting-lifes-challenges-brooks-c-wilson/1142275488

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS Matthew 6:22

Matthew 13:44 … The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

In the days when this parable was written there were no central banks as we know them today but there were money lenders who kept peoples’ money on low interest and lent money out on high interest. This led to the practice of people burying their money in fields that they owned, in a hidden place, to use when needed, and if anyone happened to be working on that field for whatever reason and found the treasure, he would know that it belonged to someone else and that stealing the money could get him into big trouble. So, if he really valued that treasure, he would have to buy the field and use the treasure perhaps to trade in business or even get some interest from the money lenders. 

We see this principle in another parable where a land owner who was travelling to a far land gave different sums of money to his servants and told them to trade it and he would reward them when he returned (Matthew 25:14). They all did well and profited to different degrees and the landowner was pleased with their results, except for one servant who buried the money in the field and did not put it to profitable use and didn’t even put it in the ‘bank’ (from ‘trapeza’ – a four legged table that served as a money exchange counter). The unprofitable servant was punished for his idleness and the unprofitable servant was cast into the outer darkness (vs.30).
Outer darkness is the state of the soul that is driven by fear and frustration and emotional turmoil while inner light is the state of the soul that is powered by faith and hope and love. The point is, that it is one thing to have a treasure buried somewhere but it is essential to put that treasure to good use, as we have a responsibility to be productive and to share our productivity with others and not just heap up treasure for ourselves. As far as spiritual treasure is concerned, nothing compares with participation in the outward flow of the Divine life for bringing grace and goodwill into this world. It is also the most fulfilled state of being that a person’s soul can experience. It is sadly odd that most people are not interested in that.

In the parable of the treasure hidden in the field the treasure represents the gift of the life of Jesus hidden within our hearts and our hearts represent the field. We don’t buy the treasure, we buy the field and the field yields the treasure. The Bible says that where our heart is that is where our treasure will be also (Matthew 6:21). We may have allowed the field of our heart over the years to treasure random things that bear no worthwhile comparison to the highest treasure there is of the Divine life within. We need to sell off that old field of our heart that contained all the pursuits that we once thought were treasures and buy the new field.  

The miracle of God’s Grace is that a new heart is given to everyone freely by God, simply waiting to be discovered by our faith. Every decision of faith in that new territory of the new heart grows the area of this new territory and as the old heart gives way to the expanding territory of the new heart, we experience a greater and greater appreciation of the new treasure within. Our spiritual journey is one of being aware of having a new heart and letting our faith decisions become the trade-offs of the old worldly values and the negative emotional baggage, for the new life-giving values of the Kingdom of God. The apostle Paul said that he had suffered the loss of all things to gain Jesus. Paul purchased the right field and found his treasure. (Philippians 3:8). 
Paul also writes about the treasure as being in an earthen vessel, which is our outer life, and no matter how fragile that vessel is, or how formidable are the pressures upon that vessel, the inner treasure is of greater power than the outward pressure. 
2 Corinthians 4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are pressured on every side by troubles, but not crushed and broken. We are perplexed because we don't know why things happen as they do, but we don't give up and quit.

Many people today are getting stuck in a cycle of negative emotional reaction to adverse circumstances in their lives and those emotional reactions come from a negative spiritual energy, but Paul is describing the ‘excellence of the power of the Spirit of God ’ within him which flows from the inner treasure in the heart. The word for ‘excellence’ in the Greek in this verse is ‘hyperbole’ which is the word we use to mean exaggerated or overstated. The Greek word means ‘to be thrown out beyond the normal range’. In other words, Paul experienced a power that was out in another orbit. It operated above the normal energy of willpower or mere emotional determination. He found the power of the indwelling treasure of the life of God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. 

When we ask ourselves about our outward capability to manage the circumstances and challenges and pressures that come upon us in these days we might well say ‘How do I cope with these difficulties or how this will work out’ – it’s unknown and unpredictable.
But each one of us can know that our inner capability to come through these pressures spiritually and emotionally is a spiritual energy that nothing can overcome and that is getting stronger day by day. As Paul says in the same Scripture above concerning the treasure in earthen vessels ‘Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward self is perishing, yet the inward self is being renewed day by day (vs.16). As all things are being shaken in these days we can see these shakings as God awakening people in the earth at this time to an awareness of the power of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. The excellency of this power is of a Kingdom within that cannot be shaken.
Can you imagine the futility of us trying to make things change in our world and not allowing things to change in ourselves first? That has never worked. 

If all that we have as a mindset is the pain of the adversity of today, we will think of life as being all about what we don’t have and what we are not, instead of the inner treasure that is about what we do have and about who we truly are in God. Whatever that mindset is becomes the spiritual energy that radiates out from us that manifests who we are and manifests the inner grace that we have to everyone around us. We have to sell off that ‘don’t have’ and ‘am not’ for what we actually ‘do have’ and who we really are, now, and allow the ‘excellence of the power of God’, that real inner state of who we are be found in us. It is a spiritual energy exchange. We can experience the peace and rest of that beautiful field and the treasure it contains.  

‘He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.’ (Psalm 23)