Thursday Bullets -- Mostly Theology of Space, Stuff

• The freezer is gone! Yeah!
• I gave about about 75 children's hangers to a lady doing a church commission sale. I like it when the things get used for a good cause.
• The sofa got looked at -- and rejected once again. I guess it's time to go to Goodwill with it.
• I went to Goodwill and purchased Chaos khaki pants and black pants for two different orchestras. She'll never wear them again -- why pay full retail?
• Coming home I drove past The Avenue. If you deemphasize certain letters -- tHEAVENue, you can see why it's the premier retail area on Mall 124 (Highway 124 -- more retail space in a stretch of two or three miles than in any Mall in the world.)
• tHEAVENue is nicer appointed than any church I've been in (well, maybe not Peachtree Road UMC.) More people too. And again I wonder if American's real religion is Materialism. We worship stuff and the acquisition of stuff. (In the Theology of Star Trek, it's easy to see the Japanese as the Klingons (Samari and Bushido and all that) -- Americans are probably the Ferangi.)
• I've been thinking about possessions -- I've a real wealth of books right now, especially books I haven't read. I have enough unread books, that if I read a chapter or two of a book and I'm not getting into it, I just toss it into the "sell" bin. Because of inheritances and whatnot, we have more than I could ever want, much less need. Telephone insulators, costume jewelry, Hummels, china, kitchen stuff. Do I possess these things or are they possessing me? The ease of replacing the book du jour makes me realize how ultimately replaceable most stuff really is.
• And stuff is really pretty easy to get -- I used to find interesting embroidered polo shirts for the Loving Husband to wear. Then I had an embroidery business and realized how easy it is to do embroidered shirts. (I actually have about 400 shirts upstairs that I am going to have to get to someday...) Stuff is so replaceable. I have great wholesale sources from these days where I can get just about anything. Hence the 100 ball pit balls. Seemed like a good idea at the time ...
  
• Trivia of the day: we see about 3000 pieces of advertising a day. Wow. That's a lot. What's the message there? Buy stuff and you will be happy. Corollary: if you don't buy our stuff, you won't be happy. Buy stuff because you are worth it. If you don't get our stuff, you aren't worth diddly. If you want to feel loved, get more stuff! Love is stuff -- stuff is love. If you don't have stuff, you aren't loved. My question? Where is God in all this? Do we think of God as just another kind of "stuff"? Is God just another thing in our lives that's replaceable?
• What does this mean for the forms and contexts I call "Church Smorgasbord", "Drive-By Church" and "Consumer Church"? What's the church to do in this consumer society? Are we too embedded in this culture to ever really do anything?