Debt

i just finished a short story by Wendell Berry called "It wasn't me". The storyline is about a man who was bequeathed a farm but struggles through how he came to receive it. This man was used to doing things by himself and does not want to have any debts to anyone...one of them who grew up in the "pull your own bootstraps" mentality. It was interesting how Berry dealt with this notion of repayment of debts...and forces one to think if debts could fully be repaid in any circumstances because of its effectual influence on multiple aspects of one's life. debts in the means of monetary transactions can be paid, but can one really monetarily place value on the effectual change that the 'bought' item might bring about? one of the quotes in the story is when one of the characters talks about buying a farm:

"the place is not its price. its price stands for it for just a minute or two while its bought and sold, and may hang over it a while after that and have an influence on it, but the place has been here since the evening and the morning were the third day"

maybe we too often confuse "value" and "price" and interchangeablely use them for our own self identification. we surely misuse it well (value and price) in the way we categorize people in the workfield....that we have come to place a person working in the field becoming less valueable than one who plays professional basketball? have we distorted our own value that we have placed a price on ourselves, too often so cheaply, that our very being is revolting against us? i see this in many relationships with people whom i work with....children pricing their parents love for them, or materials measuring an individual's worth to another. i recognize that there are more things attached to the complexity of the relationship between emotions and materials...yet somehow, we have relied on the materials to determine how our emotion and identification are viewed and recognized.
i think for me, it makes it a bit clearer and more significant that Christ paid for my debt: its at that moment in time that no one else can do it; the value of his sacrifice has no price that could ever be repaid by anyone else.