"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -Emerson

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Consumerism...

We are consumers. As individuals, as a collective we just seek out how to consume all things around us. We treat things and people with the same regard as we treat the hamburger that lays on our plate. What can we get out of this? How can this person fill me? Never once stoping to ask the question what we can give.

It should make us tired, all this consumption. Constantly having to find to new friends, a new church, a new home, new clothes, and sometimes even a new life (check ebay....people actually sell their lives.). When the people in our life no longer give us what we think we should, we cast them aside and move on to those who will momentarily fill within us the giant empty God sized void we all have. When the situations we are in are no longer conducive to our wants or our needs, we simply bail out like a pilot in a plane that is about to crash. In our wake, we leave lives. People who do not understand why they are no longer "enough" to fill our ever-consuming hunger. We cannot come out and say, "you no longer are needed" so we work in backwards and manipulative ways to somehow shift the blame onto them.

How Christ must utterly be in tears over our society and over each us? He came and asked how much more can I give? We come and ask how much more can I get? I know His heart must break knowing that He gave His all to people who don't. How it must hurt for Him to be consumed by us and spit out when we feel we no longer need Him. We all know this feeling: that friend who seems to fall away for no apparent reason, that company that gives us the option to "retire early" as our services are no longer needed, the child who begs us to stay out of their lives as they don't need us anymore. We all know this element of Christ's pain, it consumes us. But yet still, we don't acknowledge this consumption within ourselves. We don't recognize that we are doing the exact same things to our God and those around us. I wonder, what if we did stop consuming? What if every person on this Earth decided to stop consuming and start giving? How much pain could be remedied? How many fears could be alleviated? How many wars would end? How many lives would be put back together after the Humpty Dumpty tumble they've endured? What if we did follow JFK's advice and stopped asking what our country, our friends, our church, our spouses, our children, our situations could do for us and asked what we could do for them? Could we change the world?

I like to think the answer to that question is yes....are you willing to find out?

Here is to giving more...

Until next time-
-C.

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