I Want to Be A Scrooge

So what does the name Scrooge bring to your mind?

Like most people you'll think of someone miserly, mean spirited and lacking love for anyone. Bent over, twisted and grasping who can't even enjoy his own spoils never mind bestowing them on anyone else.

A Christmas Carol is a long time favorite but I wonder if we've missed the point that Dickens was trying to make.

At the end of the book, Dickens says of Ebeneezer Scrooge "Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all and infinately more...He became a good friend, a good master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any good old city, town or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them...His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him...And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well."

Now that doesn't sound like a miserly, mean spirited person at all. In fact it sounds like a Christ-like person.

In fact we could draw similarities between the fictional Scrooge with the very real Saul/Paul. Saul too was a completely different person when he started out than the Paul he ended up being.

Isn't that what we are here for? To change our Saul/Scrooge ways into becoming better men/women, better masters, better friends? To put away our old selves and become new ones?

So shouldn't we remember Scrooge the way he ended up instead of the way he was in the middle of his life?

Maybe we should all become Scrooge like.