04.27.07

Roadblocks to Joy

Posted in Family at 6:55 am by Anthony

I’ve been enjoying Philip Kenneson’s book Life on the Vine:  Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit in Christian Community.  In the chapter on joy, he talks about how manufactured desire, desires that we didn’t know that we had until someone told us, get in the way of joy.

A paragraph I read this morning reminded me of a couple of experiences this week.  We do not get the newspaper and so often miss out on all the sales.  Of course, this means that we almost never go shopping and so we end up spending much less money.  We are trying to do some home improvement and were told that Lowe’s sometimes runs some specials that we might be interested in.  I decided to buy Wednesday’s newspaper since it is of often ad-thick, but by the time I got to the Prairie Star–our local convenience store where I could pick up a paper–they were all sold out.  I thought it was quite telling that there is such a demand–including mine–to buy advertising.

Much advertising comes to us “free”, usually in the form of junk mail.  It’s not really free–the costs are built into the things we buy.  We prefer to shop for groceries close to home, although we do sometimes incorporate a stop at the Evil Empire with other trips to the big city 30+ miles away.  Our local grocery store sends out a weekly circular so we can shop the specials, and if we do, we can pay even less than at the Stuff Mart.  The problem is, to get the special prices, you have to have your “Thank You” card which allows their computer to keep up with who is buying what.  And it doesn’t always work; more than once we’ve gotten home and realized that we were charged the regular price.  We’re just tight enough that we usually go back to reclaim the few dollars difference.

Jeremy is looking over my shoulder as I type this and asked, “Why are you just writing about shopping?”  Why indeed?  It’s all to introduce this quote from Kenneson’s book, which I think deserves our attention:

We might also consider carefully the impact of leafing through the advertising circulars and mail-order catalogs that arrive daily in our mailboxes.  How many times have we found ourselves “needing” something immediately after thumbing through these ads and finding out that this or that (previously unnecessary or even unknown) product was “on sale”?  I suspect that the advertisers are more than happy for us to feel as if we are doing ourselves some favor by buying at a discount something that only minutes before we didn’t need at all.  Perhaps it would be a small step in the right direction if we determined not to peruse these instruments of desire unless we had already determined what it was that we needed. (p. 80)

Kenneson’s suggestion is not so much about saving money as it is about keeping manufactured desire from robbing us from the contentment and joy that we should find in the abundance of blessings that we already possess, most of which are not for sale, not even at the Evil Empire.

Permalink