Status Whoa

I was asked last week why I only had one pair of shorts. I simply replied, "Because it's the only pair I need." I think the retort was taken almost ridiculously, like "How in the world can someone only have one pair of something?!"

Good question.

Why do we own what we own? What's the necessity behind our articles of convenience? Why do I have a flat screen TV? Why do I own video game consoles? Why do I dress like I do?

Gah, there are so many roads to travel down with this idea, there could be more to talk about than I could even exhaust. Somewhere right below American consumerism, there is a wolf and he is black and invisible and clever. And he lives in you and he lives in me. It is that part of us that wants to devour technology, fashion, automobiles, every thing that tells us that we've quote unquote "made it." There is a credit card for people who can spend over some insane amount called THE BLACK CARD. There are dinette sets made for every demographic possible, and catalogs 600 pages thick to help moisten the palates of the working class and nonworking class alike. And we get sucked into it. We like it, we want it. We(I) want those new shoes, those sweet jeans, that cool album, and the list can go on and on and on.

But it is wrong. Our status is not dependent on what we look like, who we dress like, what our houses look like, and what car we drive. That is the status of people who need masks and who cry out for mercy and for love. The world wants to tell us that we are fat and unattractive and unloved and disgraced unless we get those things necessary for popular survival. I'll give a dollar a day for a child in Africa and call that mercy and call that giving. But how dare I! And I'll spend the rest on super sizing my meal or buying a beer. There is a balance of frugality and decent stewardship, but I think we go overboard one way or the other, telling ourselves we are really better than we are.

There was once a man who had a sandwich sign that said, "What's wrong with the world?" A man saw it, and the next day wore a similar sandwich sign beside the first sandwich-signed man. His was the answer to the question posed:

"What's wrong with the world?"

"I am."

In every realm of the world, in ever sense, we are fakers to some extent, wishing and wanting people to accept us because we do this or that. Because we are too good or too bad, or somewhere in the middle. And everywhere people wear clothes that identify them with a certain subculture of people, whether they mean to or not. And I judge those differently from me, like I am some superior Nitzche master race. Like I am some Wagnerian man. But I am not. I am afraid, I am alone, I am sad, I am poor. But I pretend some of those things don't exist, and the rest of it I find my position and my status and my acceptance in something better and bigger than what the TV or what my friends or what some woman could say to me, could whisper to me at night. I am loved unconditionally and for no reason by G-d, through Jesus Christ. He sees me as perfect and beautiful and strong and as a man and as a leader, so even when I don't feel those things, I can strive to remember those small words that he whispers in between hurricanes and volcanoes. And those will send me through, will push me past, will help me hold on.

So my final thought is this: Your status in this world, what this world calls you, what you have made yourself into, it will all fade away, whether quickly like a falling building or slowly like a dying star. But it will be gone, and you will be left alone. "Every living thing dies alone," Roberta Swallow says. I'd say she is pretty close to the truth. In the end, none of us are doctors or patients or priests or brothers or fathers or soldiers. We are all just humans, stripped away of everything temporal. And that is when the infinite will takeover. So, I suggest if you are tired of what this world calls you, even though you might be physically beautiful and popular, still this world will call to you in a way that you will never measure up to, there is One who calls you all good things and ask in return for nothing. You don't have to dress the part, you really don't. You don't have to act the part, you don't have to look like anything at all. All you do is just be. Soak in what it is to be loved unconditionally because G-d came down as Man and died for you and for me.

That's all the status we need.