Consumers?

If you listen to the news for any length of time or read news magazines you will discover that economists have a term for you and I. It is: Consumers. Do you like being known as a consumer? I don’t. It gives me the idea of the old video game, Pack Man. You just go along and your only purpose is to eat things up, consume things. I am not an economist; you will see that pretty quickly. But if I understand them correctly, to say that we are all consumers is to say that we must constantly be purchasing and using up stuff. I realize that eight years ago our country fell into a deep recession and there is still a debate about whether we are completely out of that recession. To the heart of that thought is the way economists refer to the growth of our economy, or lack of it. Usually they say the economy is “sluggish”. The way they defined sluggish is: you and I purchased a certain amount of stuff last month, and now we have purchased the same amount of stuff this month plus a little more. That is a sluggish economy. If we purchased the same amount of stuff as we did last month, plus a lot more stuff then we have a healthy economy. You see, in order for our economy to be healthy, you and I must constantly be buying a lot more stuff and possibly going into debt because of it. Why can’t we be satisfied with the stuff that we have? Why do we constantly have to be buying more stuff? Now I realize that we do need to have food and certain necessities each day. We need to continue purchasing these things. But that’s not what the health economy is based upon. It’s not based upon whether we eat or using certain necessities of life. That’s a given. No, a growing economy means you go out and you buy a lot more stuff, maybe stuff you don’t even need but you just want. Why can’t we be content with what we have? This I think, teaches us not to rely upon Christ in life, not to be content with what we have, to be one of the rats in the rat race of life in our culture. The gospel says something completely different. Rather than acquiring more stuff for ourselves we are to think of our neighbors. Rather than our happiness to be based upon the things that we have, be content with what we have and enjoy life because of the people we are close to, not the stuff we have. The Christ like way is certainly different than our culture.