A Hint of Freedom

This post was originally written in April, 2009, on the previous version of this blog. 

I’m just coming off two years of a life experiment where I quit buying myself things. It stemmed from a brief passage in Donald Miller’s book Through Painted Deserts.  It was like a passing thought, but it changed my life.  To sum it all up in context of the book, he speculated that by buying new things we take the edge off our God given desire to grow and change.  Those couple sentences were like an alarm waking me up from a dream.

So in early 2009 I got the idea during a weekend getaway with my wife that I wouldn’t buy myself anything.  In just three days of thinking this way–walking out of stores without that thing that caught my eye–I began to see how much I was manipulated by a system that wants my money.  I began to realize that having something new, sometimes almost anything new, was in fact letting me settle for far less than what God was trying to do with me.

I extended this experiment indefinitely.  Life does require some purchases, though, so I had to specify exactly what I would and wouldn’t buy.  I eventually phrased it as a commitment to not buy myself any material possession other than clothes when I needed them.  The freedom I found in this was amazing to me at times.  The clarity I had of Consumerism and what it is doing to us was worth far more than the silly things I would have accumulated in this time.

Basically, this is just one other path from Romans 12:2.  As believers, we should not let the world squeeze us into its mold.  But we do, willingly, when it flashes shiny new things before us and tells us we deserve to have them.  Jesus said we will have what we need.  In our hearts, which voice are we following?