The materialism of the season is driving me batty but I don't have the courage to do something major about it. I don't have the courage to tell my family and friends, "Oh, you probably won't like my gift anyway and even if you do, it will end up in next year's garage sale, so can I just feed a 1,000 starving children and we all will be happy." But I don't. I feel like such a bahhumbug. It is not that I care less for my family and friends than I did 5 years ago. It is just that I have seen children with no shoes, no clothes, no food and no one to care for them. How can I just spend money on gifts that no one really needs?
I know that not everyone has experienced the things that I have. I also know that most people have not held an infant in their arms who may not have lived due to malnutrition. But what do I do with this? God allowed me to experience it.
It is really not helping with the stress of the Holiday Season. I think I am burning out, I'm tired. Is it disobedience? I really hate to disappoint people but do I hate disappointing my Jesus more?
I wish we had the finances to do both. Feed the 1,000 children and give the gifts but wouldn't that be avoiding the subject. To be sacrificial, I should then feed 2,000 children. Oh, is anyone else struggling out there? I have been told that God put me in American and it is ok to live here. Ok, but maybe He has kept me in American to use what we have. Use it to "seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow." (Isaiah 1)
So hard to do the cultural things, when all I can see is faces like this.
Is there a balance?
Boy, Am I struggling to find it.
