Your fist thought would be that this was not real; your second thought would be that the church must be handing out 100 dollar bills!
Either way, you are acknowledging a basic psychological fact:
people sacrifice for their gods.
In this case, Black Friday represents a "holy" day for millions of Americans offering their "tithes" to the god of prosperity. They are willing to inconvienence themselves to get up before the worms are awake; they are willing to expend precious family, house and work time to wait in line for fleeting material goods. Adding in the traffic headackes, complaining children and customers as well as one's sanity, Americans expend much more mental, physcial, and temporal energy for a once-a-year event than they do figuring out what issues to vote upon!
But they all believe it was worth it.
When this "tithing" (as well as the "tithing" throughout the year on TVs, cars, videos, cable, internet, computers and games) is added up it quickly dwarfs the church tithing of America. When the time, energy and commitment are thrown into the equation, church recedes into the background. Apparantly, the things of this world are worth such efforts. The things of God are not.
Sacrifices to one's god is easily discovered through such an analysis: what are you willing to do to please your god?
Get up early for prayer time, sunday school and church?
Set up the books and chairs sunday morning?
Take time to attend weekly bible study?
Tithe to God's Church?
Pray, read and study the Bible daily?
We are willing to spend time, energy and money on the things that are worth it.
Clearly, God's church and people are worth our time.
It is worth it for me.
Is it worth it for you?
SDG
2 comments:
Love this post--a certain wildman and myself were wondering if we could use this for our church newsletter.
You know who people are by the way they allocate their resources. a/k/a 'follow the money'.
Post a Comment