Pastor's Weekly Word

For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. (Psalm 62:1)

We live in a consumer driven culture, one that, if unchecked, easily becomes hell bent on feeding our growing appetites for more stuff. Accepting this reality also pushes us to accept what the problem of it is. The problem is not economic or political. It’s not practical or relational. The problem is spiritual. Our consistent increase in consumption is a spiritual problem that results in us and our children having a skewed version of reality. Author Albert Hsu makes the observation that children growing up a consumer driven culture “may have a distorted view of what the average family ‘needs’ to own. He also asserts that “parents who provide too much for their children create people who go through their adult lives chronically dissatisfied.”

All of this certainly sounds bleak, but it does not have to be that way. One thing to keep in mind, and even be challenged by, is that we belong to a community that shares a different kind of reality. It is a reality that counters the consumer culture we live in, one that calls upon us to redirect our thinking and our hearts over and over again. We are a people who support each other in the slow spiritual work of facing our own foibles and misdirection as we open ourselves up to the reality of the Spirit of God. This is the purpose of the church. Like the psalmist, we wait in silence, not for the next invention to be introduced, not for the latest product to be unveiled, but for the God from whom our salvation comes.