I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, “Black Friday is proof that Thanksgiving didn’t stick.” I understand the importance of proper qualifications. One should not hear in that pithy phrase a condemnation either of getting a good deal, or having nice things. I’m in favor of both. No “bah, humbug” from me. What concerns me isn’t the thriftiness of finding the best deals but our propensity to feel dissatisfied, to believe that things can bolster our contentment. It’s one thing to get up early in the morning to go in search of bargains, another thing altogether to go in search of meaning. One you can find almost anywhere. The other, you’d be looking in all the wrong places.
We’re all familiar with the story of John D. Rockefeller when he, who was at the time the richest man in the world, was asked, “How much money is enough?” His response, “Just a little bit more.” If you think this a lesson on how greedy the rich are you’re missing who you are in the story. It is true enough that the rich are greedy. So are, however, the middle class. Even the poor don’t escape. Greed is a human heart problem, not a income bracket problem. We would all answer as Rockefeller did, were we honest. There are always things we’d like to have that seem just out of our reach, a kind of mental shopping list for when our ship comes in, “If somehow I had X dollars, then I’d buy Y.” Perhaps because this isn’t necessarily a look we like to see in the mirror, we may instead tell ourselves, “If somehow I had X dollars, then I’d give Y to Z.” We tell ourselves what great givers we’d be, if we only had more. But here’s the thing. Precious few of us have ever found ourselves in debt because we were donating too much to others. Precious few of us are financially upside down because of what we wanted to give. It is instead what we wanted to get. We fault the Pharisees for making a grand show of their giving, while we hide our merely hypothetical giving in our minds.
There are two potent signposts that show us what we value, rather than what we like to think we value, what do we spend our time on, and what do we spend our money on? On Black Friday the two come together as we give up time sleeping in order to purchase more stuff.
Please do not hear me scolding anyone. Rather hear me confessing. I have confidence in my assessment of your heart simply because of the ugliness I see in my own. That said, here’s something we all ought to be thinking about as we wake from our feast-induced coma. Maybe we should be thinking about what we can give rather than what we can get. Maybe we should be looking for bargains, those organizations that provide great bang for your buck. Maybe we should put the gratitude we expressed yesterday to work today.