His Name Was "Marvelous Riches"
⊆ 9:57:00 AM by AKBogert | ˜ 1 comments »Even as a kid i was familiar with the American phenomenon known as "Black Friday." Long before my siblings received the terrible news that reindeer don't fly i had learned that the real secret to getting what i wanted under the artificial tree in our living room was to construct a detailed list and hand it to my mother before going to bed Thanksgiving night.
What i didn't entirely grasp, for a while, was how many other mothers were going out the following day, long before the sun poked its blinding face over the horizon, for precisely the same reason. And my mother never traveled alone--she was always accompanied by another mother; her own.
And so December 25th would roll around and we would ecstatically tear through the carefully-papered packages, Joshua and Rachel in the hopes that Santa had overlooked a few incidents over the past year and myself in the hopes that my mom had won out in the battle royale that had inevitably ensued over the products i had requested. Sometimes our hopes were less than fulfilled.
But that was okay, because we still had Grandma. Grandma's visiting was always a veritable second Christmas. It was as if they did it on purpose, divvying up the presents in such a way as to intentionally shatter our dreams only to miraculously reassemble them a day or two later.
I suppose the point of this is that even my siblings, who believed in Santa, figured out the system. If he forgot to drop a few of the things we asked for under our tree, he never failed to drop them off under hers. The anticipation died away and we grew to expect everything we asked for, to the point where we would have to make lists too hard for Santa to handle just to be surprised. Of course one or two bad surprises inevitably resulted in a ranking system, so that we wouldn't really "know" what we were getting but we let the fat man know which presents we would be rather unhappy at not receiving.
And so Christmas became utterly commercial, and even though we are all old enough to know that the day after Thanksgiving is when most of the shopping gets done; that our family could probably do without the extravagance it endured in our younger years; that Grandma still has a lot of financial obligations and would do well not to be encouraged by our greed--despite all these things, our lists grow longer and larger.
As a college student, Christmas has become an anomaly. I've reached the point where Christmas simply means being home rather than away, which can be a double-edged sword at times. When home is home, it's nice, but when home is simply a haunted house in a haunted town filled with haunted people--it ceases to be so warm. The harsh realities around me--under my roof, in my extended family, in the church i attend--sometimes make being home a difficult burden to bear.
And then there is the knowledge that, while i need money to get by as a college student, i no longer feel guiltless about asking for it. A twenty-dollar bill used to evoke glee and screaming. That became a cool, calculated insertion into my thickening wallet. Now it's more of a selfish sigh that suggests "well, it's something." And yet anything more or less--or at a time other than birthday or holiday--is immediately disarming and awkward. Much in the same way i struggle with meeting people eye-to-eye as i pass them on campus (much less saying hello), or in the way i don't know how to take a compliment properly, the way in which i receive unsolicited cash has become an internal struggle between my desire to have cash to burn and my knowledge that such a sacrifice on the part of, say, my Grandmother can no longer be ignored under the naive banner of my deserving it. As the years roll on, and as my uncle lives under her roof, and as the cost of living continues to skyrocket between gas and medical supplies, i must recognize that every dollar i receive is a dollar i really shouldn't be taking.
My financial habits, then, have grown entirely out of hand. I am eternally living outside of the limits of my money, all the while telling myself that a lack of debt indicates that i'm not really doing so. I suppose somewhere down the line i forgot that i was going to college, and that my parents' willingness to take on the yoke of my expenses has been both taken for granted and will not necessarily last, particularly under our family's financial situation.
I received, as most people know, $10,000 from my grandfather for graduation, along with the message "I know you'll spend it wisely." Oh the sting of those words and the regret that bubbles up every time they are recalled. It could have covered a semester of college, or bought a car. It could have gone into some sort of clever investment, such as stocks or a high-interest, long-term account.
But it's gone.
I keep justifying it too. First and foremost is the MacBook Pro. All told, this little number cost me about $4000, a number that increasingly strikes me as outrageous. True, i consider it an investment: i bought a very high-end model with cutting-edge software (Adobe Creative Suite 3 Premium), and thus will not have to upgrade it for quite some time.
However, such a purchase set a precedent. It wasn't terribly long after being in college that i decided i wanted a television, and $2400 later i owned a 56-inch DLP with surround sound and a 5-disc DVD changer.
I've tried, for quite a while, to explain away my anxiety over the purchase by telling people, and myself, that it, too, was an investment. I've actually used the excuse "well i would have just upgraded every other year, but i figure getting one this big means i won't feel obligated to get anything bigger."
What a load of bull.
Let's forget, for a moment, that the size of the device is entirely impractical so far as dormitory living goes, and that you can only ever watch one DVD at a time (thus making a 5-disc changer unnecessary), and the fact that my 360 is hooked up to the television and it, too, plays DVDs.
Why am i accepting this lie? The very idea that i would, inevitably, feel compelled to constantly go for bigger and better on a regular basis, ought to be stomach-turning. To plan, well in advance, to be unhappy with your purchases because they are not the absolute best that money can by is, really, just evil. It is, after all, the love of money (and what money can bring) that spurns such behavior and mentality, and such love is, as we know, simply the root of a bigger problem.
Speaker and musician Justin McRoberts, who spoke in chapel yesterday, told us a story about a friend of his, a coordinator of Young Life ministries, who received a call one day from a man (I believe his name was Marti) who believed God wanted to establish a Young Life community in Liberia. Over the course of the call, Justin's friend realized that Marti was in the middle of a warzone, and had braved the bullets and bombs because he knew there was a phone in the city he could use.
Needless to say, Justin's friend took a group to Liberia to meet with Marti and several others. They held hands to pray for God's hand in the project, and a man named Marvelous Riches led the prayer. His parents had both been gone since he was an infant, and the people who had raised him had given him no other name than this reminder that he was valuable to God: that everything in his life was just another example of the marvelous riches God wants to give to His people.
You can picture such a prayer meeting in our church. Someone with a reputation for "good prayers" would probably be asked to start. Or perhaps volunteers would be asked for and, none willing, the initiator would step forward. Then would follow the high talk and occasionally hollow praise that is more for show than utility, and perhaps, nested among the "Father God"s and the "Lord"s that are repeated every three words or so, a plea for God to accept the plans we'd already made would go out before an enthusiastic closing and a chorus of amens.
Not so with Marvelous Riches. He began:
"God, thank you for my shoes.
"Thank you for my pants.
"Thank you for food, and a warm place to sleep tonight.
"Thank you...
Marvelous Riches understood. He understood that he had been redeemed, and that his life was no longer his own. He had been bought for a price, and every single thing he had--from those items we consider inalienable rights such as food and water to the very clothes he wore--all these things had been given to him because God had willed it. He had little, but Marvelous Riches took nothing for granted.
So why the hell do i feel like i'm entitled to a television at all, let alone one bigger than everyone else's?
Has my grandfather provided $10,000 so that i can further inflate my braggadocio with meaningless extravagancies?
Has God given me an American upbringing so i can be imbued with greed and selfishness?
Clearly not.
But then, i don't know what to do with myself anymore.
I'm pretty sure the first step is to sell the television. It's a symbol of everything wrong with me and everything wrong with the world i live in. And the second step is to take the money i get from such a sale and turn it over to someone who will be able to keep it safe until i am actually mature enough to handle it.
I'm going to have to admit it eventually, so i may as well ask my grandpa to hold the money for me until i've demonstrated the responsibility he so wishfully thought i already possessed.
But that's still not fixing the problem. I can sell a television, and i can keep money safe by giving it to someone else, but i need to learn how to handle these things on my own or else they'll just repeat themselves. Giving the money to someone keeps the money safe but it doesn't get rid of the danger that once threatened that money, and other money will come along to be threatened unless the habits that cause the danger are resolved.
So here it goes. A lot of prayer. A lot of effort.
And, excuse my Obama reference, but
It's time for change.
