One day, a certain man became a Christian. He had been thinking about it for months, and a next door neighbor had explained the faith in a compelling way. This man and his wife both accepted the Lord, and were baptized the following Sunday.
The next day, Monday morning, before he went to work, the man answered a knock at the door, and was astonished to find an angelic messenger there. He had not been told to expect anything like this, and so it was not surprising that he was surprised.
What the angel did surprised him even more. He was given a packet of materials as a sort of welcome gift. Glancing inside, he saw the usual assortment that comes in such packets, and he thanked the angel appropriately, but was still somewhat confused. The angel left, and the man did not have time to go through the packet because he was late for work.
And when he got home that evening, the kids were all over him so he did not have time to go through it then either. And of course, with one thing and another, he kept postponing the task of working through the papers and gifts. It is not surprising, then, that the packet finally wound up in their file cabinet behind the insurance papers.
Finally, ten years later, the man finally was pricked in his conscience, and decided that he really needed to go through that stuff. Imagine his surprise when, at the bottom of the packet, he found a bank book, with his name on it, and when he looked at the balance, he was astonished to see that he had ten billion dollars in his account.
Now, how long was he a billionaire? And how long was he not acting like it?