GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 13-2
The Temporal and the Eternal
The collapse of the Enron Corporation in Houston, Texas—where the headquarters building still stands as a prominent part of the city’s skyline—shook the financial world in 2001. For years, the company, founded in 1985 through the merger of two natural gas companies, was the darling of corporate America. For six consecutive years, Fortune magazine named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company.” Employees were rewarded with company stock that they were not permitted to sell or trade. Employees’ retirement portfolios swelled—some to millions of dollars—but with Enron’s collapse, the stock price plummeted to less than $1 per share and then to virtually nothing by the company’s bankruptcy in 2004.
There were sad stories from some of Enron’s 20,600 employees who had planned their retirements on the company’s stock—stock that evaporated with the company’s collapse. The company’s assets were sold, with the proceeds used to pay creditors. The unfortunate employees were left with nothing. Their savings were gone.
Jesus and his disciples were leaving the beautiful temple in Jerusalem that King Herod was constructing when one disciple commented on it. “And Jesus said to him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? There certainly will not be left here stone upon stone which will not be cast down.’” (Mark 13:2)
Of all the lessons of this story—and there are many—one must be the lesson that the material world is unreliable and unpredictable. The only things left of the once-magnificent temple are a few foundation stones, before which worshipers still pray daily. The retirement portfolios of Enron employees are gone—reduced to a few worthless pieces of paper. So, plan? Yes. Yet never let go of the eternal for the sake of the temporal.
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