thought exercise on Stuff

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...

Kristen Welch, in her book Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World , described the growing discontent their family experienced after pursuing more and more stuff. She describes it this way with ...

Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...

Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.” ...

Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...

I was recently at a eight-year-old’s birthday party, and at this birthday party there was a piñata. All of the kids took turns whacking a paper mache shark with a PVC pipe until eventually the shark b...

Awesome stuff never satisfies. Nothing in the entire physical, created world can give rest, peace, identity, meaning, purpose, or lasting contentment to your awe-craving heart. Looking to stuff to sat...

In America, we consume twice as many material goods as we did fifty years ago. Over the same period, the size of the average American home has nearly tripled, and today that average home contains abou...

The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...

Jesus warns against greed and seeking wealth, because ultimately, money is fiction. Gold coins? Slips of paper? Ones and zeroes in a computer? They only have value because people think they do....

One of the early hits of the internet had to be eBay. Suddenly getting rid of your old junk, or otherwise unnecessary “stuff,” could be sold, not just to your neighbors in a yard sale, but to anyone w...

Where you look for awe will shape the direction of your life. It just makes sense that your source of awe will control you, your decisions, and the course your story takes. If you live in awe of mater...

“The reason I am a minimalist today,” Troy began, “is because of the color of my house.” I’d never heard that one before, so I asked Troy to explain what he meant. Troy was a tall man of about forty w...

I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...

I have a nagging sense that when we read the word blessed , we either feel indifferent or suspicious. Both of these responses are likely the result of the way the term is (over)used in our day-to...

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

When we watch cartoons, it is fun to see the way we can so easily allow some of the craziest stuff to just be taken at face value. Movements that don’t follow the laws of physics? Sure. Talking animal...

While there are an infinite number of ways for a movie to fall short, a common complaint is if the inciting incident of the drama is solved in a way that comes out of nowhere, even breaking the logic ...

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

There’s a quote by H. Richard Niebuhr that I believe is absolutely true.  “The great Christian revolutions,” he argued, “come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen w...

I love golf. If only it loved me in return. Alas, it is a one-sided romance. My golf swing is the stuff that keeps an instructor awake at night. One kindly compared it to an octopus falling from a tre...

When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a pervasive sense of societal malaise seems to be affecting a significant portion of the population. Journalist and managing editor of Time , Lily Rothman, ...

I’ve never really played a single note in my life. For 8 years I played the clarinet growing up. Actually, that’s not true. I took lessons but I’m not sure I actually played the clarinet. I went to h...

While I was at a concert in college, I responded to a flyer requesting volunteers to sponsor a child overseas. For years I read the letters from this little girl in El Salvador. Ruth seemed happy to b...

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

In this short excerpt from Brant Hansen’s excellent book, Unoffendable, the author shares a “hypothetical” example of how he deals with online criticism. Generally speaking, it never goes the way you ...

What causes anxiety? I offer this list so you can engage in an exercise… genetic predispositions parenting (overprotective, overcontrollers, inconsistent responders) early childhood experiences tha...

One day an ad from one of my favorite stores showed up in my email inbox. Splashed across the top in big letters was the phrase “JOY MAKERS.” Of course, the ad was pointing shoppers to deals on toys, ...

Sabbath is that ancient idea and practice of intentional rest that has long been discarded by much of the church and our world. Sabbath is not new. Sabbath is just new to us. Historically, Christians ...