So watch this video of Black Friday 2015 (at least parts of it) and tell me if you feel these thoughts:
We know that the gods Americans worship are POWER, MONEY, and SEX. The love and obsession of those things drive our lives, our economy, our entertainment, and our interests as a nation.
This video highlights the lengths at which the love of money and possessions will push us. It’s enough to say that I feel sorry for the staff and workers, and I think it’s a travesty that shops open on Thanksgiving, but the fire and fight in people’s eyes that drives them to trample, push, shove, and neglect their neighbor in pursuit of possessions is really alarming.
Yes, the God of Money picked Black Friday as its venerable day of worship and we are watching the service as its people praise it. Ah, there is no song to be sung, no priest to minister, but the worship is loud within our hearts as its moves our feet and our wallets.
It is not just mob mentality or groupthink.
No, there is something within us, when triggered by the right environment, that produces this behavior. It is that worship of money and possessions rearing its head.
I sit here on my computer and watch this in shock, but there is a greater and more sobering reality to be realized:
It is always easy to read about the madness of others and to distance ourselves as different or higher. But the deeper one looks, the sooner they will see the semblance between the madness observed and the inner workings of ourselves. And the truth is that I am not much different than these people.
Yes, in ways I do and don’t understand, this video is a mirror of what happens in my own heart on a week-to-week basis as a middle-class American. I am only wise enough to not join the company of the madmen but not pure enough to say that that lust does not drive me as well.
Money, possessions, money, possessions, money, possessions, MONEY, POSSESSIONS. Our raging insatiable addiction of addition.
Closets, storehouses, attics, accounts-full of things, trinkets, and stuff. Where moth and rust took the lives of our once-treasured possessions eons ago, the cycle of the next greatest things continues to consume us unaware.
Break it-we cannot easily, for the god of money and possessions demands perpetual praise. And the infrastructure of its sanctuary is woven deep within our society, our politics, and our very hearts.
Who will deliver us from this altar of madness? Who will deliver my own heart from this addiction? Who can shine light to see the mud of our society-how we are swimming in it, drowning in, and feeding it to others? And who will show us where true life is found?
God, if you stand opposed to the god of money, then help me, then help us. Yes, I know that it is no god at all. But help me to see its vanity, and teach me to drink from the fountain of your life. Which gives true life, contentment, and eternal happiness.
