Have you ever looked around your home and get the feeling that someone came by while you were asleep and dropped off everything that is in your living room or hall way cabinet? Or better yet, I am 28 years old and looking at all that we have, I am almost convinced that I've lived longer. As I stumbled around our apartment today getting ready for work, I realized that maybe its not that we need a bigger place, but that our junk needs a bigger storage space. Drawers, closets, cabinets, shelves, and we can't forget the nagging "coolness" of the Ikea storage furniture that screams out POST MODERN! And the most frustrating part of it all is the relentless attempts to "purge", only to find out later that you were really making more room for more STUFF!
As a child I visited my family in the Dominican Republic and remember being puzzled by the fact that my aunts kitchen only had ONE pot. A stock pot, in which she fried eggs, made soup, cooked rice, boiled water and brilliantly served as a basin to wash fruits and vegtables. Now when I look at my kitchen, I see pots and pans of all sizes. The smallest somehow gets designated to scramble eggs, the one after that is for reheating leftovers and sauces, the one after that is to fry chicken breast, up to the largest where we make our "broke" meals of lentil soup and week lasting pots of minestrone. We tend to keep that pot in the far back of the cabinet. It almost acts as the financial gauge for the household. But something that I've noticed is that the more we have, the more affluent we think we are. Get a raise? Buy more stuff. Have left over money? Buy more stuff. Depressed? Go get that to cheer you up. Then we are puzzled when we realize that our sense of security isn't in Christ, but in the checking account.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am thankful that I have been blessed with the resources to own things, but is it really a blessing to own ALL of them? One thing John Piper says is that "AMERICA is the MOST DANGEROUS place to raise a child." And his reasoning for that statement is that there are too many distractions. There is so much STUFF to distract us from acknowledging the priceless Savior. The ironic thing is, HIS GIFT IS FREE TO US!
Also, with so much buying and owning, what examples do we set for our kids? Climb that corporate ladder so that you can own all that you want? Jesus never said that it was a bad thing to be poor or have little, in fact he said the opposite. But quite often he does tell us of the difficulties a rich man has in this world and preparing for the next (Mark 10:17-31). Again, I am not saying that it is wrong to have money, but what I am saying is that with the money that we do have, whether its a little or a lot, what do we do with it? And all the stuff that I have already, do I use it? Or can I donate it to Goodwill and live a less cluttered, less stressful, less THINGS life, so that our focus is devoted to the important things? I am not making a case to live like the Amish (although I respect their simplicity, but not the legalism), but isn't it ridiculous that we live in a culture where there are two forks, two spoons, two knives, two glasses, two bowls, two plates, 2 pots, 2 pans and they all serve a different purpose for ONE meal?
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