Hetty Green the Money Hoarder
-The corruption of the possessions of wealthy people witness against them. People who hoard and set out to accumulate great amounts of money and possessions fail to recognize that God gave them wealth for a reason.
-For many years Hetty Green was called America’s greatest miser. When she died in 1915, she left an estate valued at $100 million, an especially vast fortune for that day. But she was so miserly that she ate cold oatmeal in order to save the expense of heating the water. When her son had a severe leg injury, she took so long trying to find a free clinic to treat him that his leg had to be amputated because of advanced infection. It has been said that she hastened her own death by bringing on a fit of apoplexy while arguing the merits of skim milk because it was cheaper than whole milk.
At one time, she was the richest woman in America. Her estate was valued at from 65 to 100 million dollars. Her income from real estate, stocks, bonds, etc. was $5 a minute or $300 an hour. Yet Hetty lived her life on a lower scale than her scrubwoman did.
For example, she padded her thin, worn clothes with newspapers to keep the biting New York City cold from chilling her too badly. She was sole owner of a couple of railroads, she never indulged in the luxury of a Pullman berth. Instead she sat up all night in the day coach.
-One hot, sizzling day, someone found the world’s richest woman in the stuffy, hot attic of a warehouse that Hetty had inherited from her father. For hours and hours she sweated away doing what? sorting white rags from colored rags because the local junk man paid a cent a pound more for white rags.
-Realizing that if she had a permanent address the tax collector would swoop down upon her and claim $30,000 a year, Hetty Green drifted from one cheap lodging house to another, dressed in rags, and with so little baggage that suspicious landladies often made Hetty pay for her night’s lodging in advance.
-Prior to her death at the age of 81, the victim of a stroke of paralysis, the nurses who cared for her were instructed by friends of Hetty to wear their street dresses, not their white uniforms. In this way, Hetty would think that they were poorly paid servants. She would not have died peacefully if she had suspected that they were expensive, trained nurses. This was the life of Hetty Green, a woman who loved money. If she had loved God instead of money, how different her life would have been!
-Perhaps the last verse in James 4 will be the biggest regret for the miserly who chose to hoard, rather than to help: James 4:17 Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.
From a sermon by Mark Opperman, If Money Could Talk..., 6/2/2010