Our church staff recently went to lunch together to share an unhurried meal and celebrate a birthday. We were seated one table over from two guys who had their laptops open, along with their blackberries.
Between work, listening to the Cubs, answering e-mail and downloading iTunes they actually conversed with each other. Between bites, of course. The guttural sounds we heard weren’t exactly complete sentences or thoughts, just a bunch of monosyllabic comments, like “Uh huh.”
Between the two of them they had about every gizmo and thingamajig imaginable. How the waitress found room to set their order on the table is a minor miracle.
Do we really need all these toys, or are we just trying to leave the impression with complete strangers that we are important and in demand? Have we lost the ability to sit quietly and converse or are we attached to our toys with an umbilical cord? Frankly, I’m not so certain that our playthings have really improved the quality of our lives.
My dad used to make homemade ice cream, and he expected my siblings and me to help. Our ice cream maker was handed down and rumor was that it crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower. Mom would blend all the ingredients, and Dad would add ice and salt while the Thomas kids shared the duty of turning the crank.
We enjoyed it so much that Dad eventually bought an electric ice cream maker. Since we no longer had to turn that old crank, we assumed that ice cream would be served more frequently. Instead of the family making the ice cream together, we waited for Dad to do it by himself, but he didn’t like working alone. It wasn’t long before homemade ice cream became nothing more than a fond memory in our household.
Come to think of it, most of the stuff my dad bought to improve our lives only detracted from the quality of our family. Truth is, those things didn’t save us time or enhance our relationships; they short-circuited what we already had.
Richard A. Swenson wrote a book titled, “The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits.” Swenson says that every family needs one tool to combat the tendency toward too much activity, commitments and possessions. That tool is “margin.”
Margin is the white space around the edges of your newspaper. The editor left enough to make the page attractive and to give you hope that there isn’t too many words to read.
An anonymous man once approached Jesus to complain about his brother who refused to share his father’s inheritance. Jesus declined to intervene, but he added this warning: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15, NIV).
The next time you are tempted to buy the latest fad, remember what Pliny the Younger said: “An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.”
Tony Thomas is a church pastor, a high school basketball coach and author of “A Smidgeon of Religion.” He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com
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