Tara is reading through Randy Alcorn’s the Treasure Principle. In that book he gives an excellent word picture about how we should view material possessions. Let’s say you are from Missouri – that Missouri is your home – and you are going to visit someone in France for a few weeks. You know that you will be returning to Missouri after the time is up and that you cannot take anything more back to Missouri with you than what you showed up in France with.
In that situation you wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time in France accumulating stuff. And you wouldn’t buy nice wall hangings or furniture for your hotel room in France given the fact you are only staying for a short while. You would simply buy what you needed to live – food, perhaps clothes if what you brought didn’t suit the environment, and very little else.
With followers of Jesus we are told that this world is not our home. The Kingdom of Heaven is our home. We are also told that we should invest in that Kingdom, not this earth, because what we invest in here will fade away and burn.
This has been an especially vivid word picture for us as we prepare for a moving sale and to head to the University of the Nations. It seems that each time we go through our piles of what we have we move more and more from the “keep” or “take” piles into the “get rid of” pile. It’s very freeing. And it’s amazing how some things that seemed so important to have even as recently as a month ago are becoming something that we wished we’d never wasted our time or money on.
It’s not easy and there are definitely moments, every day, where I think I must be crazy to get rid of so many things. I worry about having nothing. I worry about losing it all. I worry about whether I’m selling something for pennies when I imagine I might have to buy it again. But then God reminds me to trust Him and how Jesus told His disciples to follow Him – leaving behind the things that hold us down. And I believe and rest in that.
[If you have sensitive ears, the below video is a Carlin stand-up routine and does include strong language at times – about the first two minutes are great and the last minute adds nothing.]
(George Carlin on “Stuff” – language advisory)