The people of Holland have had a centuries-old love affair with tulips.
For a brief stretch of time that passion bordered on insanity.
Tulips grow wild toward the eastern end of the Mediterranean. When bulbs were first imported to northern Europe in the 17th century, their lively colors quickly became a celebrated harbinger of spring. That’s when popular imagination began to stir. Tulip bulbs were increasingly considered valuable. But exactly how valuable were they?
Speculators in Amsterdam, home of the world’s first modern stock market, begin to drive up tulip prices about 1634.
As documented in his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Decisions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay notes that it quickly became clear that no one wanted to be left behind. Even as the rich began dabbling in the flower markets, those who very much wanted to become rich decided to join them aboard the Tulip Express.
Economists now call it “Tulipomania.” Bulbs began to change hands, only to be bought and sold again. Prices skyrocketed.
A single bulb was traded for a carriage and two horses. Mackay reports that at one point a farmer offered 12 acres of land for just one Semper Augustus bulb. Ordinary Dutch citizens sacrificed clothing, keepsakes, and even houses to get their hands on this new form of currency. At one point, a single Viceroy Tulip bulb was priced higher than an entire year’s average wage.
Then, in February 1637, the petals on the tulip market began to wilt.
To this day, no one knows what started the panic. The price of tulips suddenly and dramatically crashed. Just as there had been a kind of collective delusion that flower bulbs were somehow worth a hundred times more than their weight in gold, people seemed to wake up to the fact that, “You know, I probably shouldn’t trade my 401(k) for something I’m going to bury in my garden.”
It was the first time in history, but certainly not the last, that a speculative bubble burst.
Just ten years ago, Nout Wellink, who once presided over the Dutch Central Bank, lambasted the Bitcoin financial disaster. “It’s worse than tulipomania,” he said, adding, “At least then you got a tulip, now you get nothing.”
The Dutch economy eventually recovered. But a number of families and individuals lost everything. When a few people holding now-worthless contracts demanded full payment, the courts shrugged, “Surely you knew you were gambling with your life savings. You lost.”
That’s the danger of mixing up life’s price tags.
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of over-valuing things that truly don’t matter, while failing to honor the things we say we value the most.
Why do we fall for the lie that staying a few more hours at the office is a better investment than spending time with family members? And what leads us to tell ourselves that God is the center of our lives when we spend so many hours binge-watching TV shows?
For every one of us, investing our lives in things of ultimate worth has to be a lifelong quest.
According to the book of Revelation (21:21), heaven’s main avenues will be paved with gold. That may seem like an expression of opulence, but in truth it’s the Bible’s way of putting gold in its place.
Think how many people have sacrificed everything in this world – including their own lives – trying to obtain as much of that shiny yellow metal as they possibly could. But in heaven we will walk on it. It’s fit only for the soles of our feet.
It’s safe to say that in God’s new creation, our price tags will finally be allocated in such a way that God will be glorified.
In the meantime, spiritual maturity might be defined as growing in our discernment, here and now, of the true value of our relationships and activities – and then living courageously in the light of those understandings.
Along the way, of course, we should stop and enjoy the tulips.
And keep on thanking God that there is nothing, in this world or the next, that will ever surpass the value of his love and grace.
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