Consumption Obession

By nature, I am a true pack rat. I am not going to hide the fact that I own a lot of items. I love to shop, I love to find good deals. And I can never seem to part with anything. I always have some kind of excuse. "Oh, I'll use this for ____" or "I was going to wear that one day". And yet, despite the fact that I own a lot of stuff, I still find reasons to long and want more. I often wish I had purchased things that I saw in the store. "Oh, why didn't I get that?" I often think to myself.

This is definatly not the way to live my life. This past weekend, I have been working on a paper for one of my classes. I have to research the company's history and past advertising ideas and what they have been up to the past couple years. The company I chose from the list was American Girl. I used to love American Girl. I always wanted one, but I knew that my family couldn't afford one. So instead, I saved up all the magazine catalogs that I got in the mail, and whenever I got sad, I would stare at all the pictures and dream up stories about the characters. I read some of the books, and owned a few as well. We could afford the books.

Eventually, I gave up my dream of owning an American Girl. When I got older, my parents offered to buy me one. But by then, the excitment of owning one was long gone, and no one really cared anymore. And so my dream of owning one never came true.

But this past weekend, that thought came back in my head. I suddenly longed to own one again. I even thought of buying one. Why? Why did I so desperatly want one? All I talked about was how I wished I had gotten one and why couldn't I get one? So stupid. It's just an object-just an item. I do not need to own everything in the world. Yes, it would be nice to have one. But do I need one? No.

Especially since money is very tight these days-to waste money on a doll is stupid. But it was just the thought-the thought of owning one. I was consumed with the thought of items. God doesn't want us to love money or items. Shouldn't we love people and not items?

I came across this in an old textbook and I love the thought behind it:
The relationship between people and their objects is a complex and multifaceted one, which is continually negotiated between the material and the immaterial. Objects are used as tokens of affection, symbolic gestures and statements of devotion and can be represented, employed and appropriated in a multitude of ways. They carry out important roles in our relationships with each other, either as bearers of significance, or through embodiment, engagement or control. The seductive quality of objects can also mediate our relationships with them, as they engage our emotions in both subliminal and visceral ways. In doing so they facilitate the projection and subversion of identities, and the creationof the contexts in which they operate.

It's true-I hold onto a lot of items for sentimantal reasons. I have a box of almost every letter that I have ever gotten, so whenever I get sad, angry or upset, I can go back and get happy again. I also keep a lot of gifts that I get, stuffed animals I received, and pictures of everything. I like to look back on happy memories, because I want to enjoy life-as it was, is, and is to come. I think when you appreciate what you have at the moment, you will learn to be okay when you don't always get what you want. I may not have gotten an American Doll, but I gained an impressive imagaination. I gained an appreciation for hanging from trees and enjoying the fresh air.

As I was thinking back, I realized that I had overlooked the past that I had purchased an American Girl computer game. It had all the characters and you made up stories and they would act what you wrote. It was perfect for a writer like me, and I loved the game a lot. That was better than any doll I could have ever received.

Sometimes you need to look for the postive in everything. Things may not always go your way, you may not always get what you want. But things happen for a reason. You may not know what that reason is today, tomorrow or even ever. However, if we learn to be happy no matter what, good things will come. We don't need objects to be happy. We just need each other.

"For the love of money is the root of all evil" 1 Timothy 6:10