I went to the Southcenter Mall yesterday after stopping by a bookstore nearby. There, I worked on my laptop for a while, and then I decided to browse through the stores. It is one of the nicest and biggest malls around here. And even though it was middle of a weekday, there were a lot of people. And a thought hit me:

These stores are temples and the items they sell are incenses we offer up to the American god of materialism. I saw many worshipers during broad day light being enticed and pulled to these gods and goddesses… And of course like any other false god, they over promise and under deliver. (A makeup that will make you look 10 years younger, for example!) It was an eerily similar feeling I had as I walked by the mosques in Indonesia enticing passerbys to stop and worship…

We live to be able to afford these things. Or to have more of those things. We study, work, discipline our children to study and work so that we and they can continue to afford the lifestyle we have set for ourselves. But to what end? Have you thought about the utter futility and mindlessness of the whole practice we involved ourselves in? We work to the bones so that we can have a few remaining days to rest. But what do we do on those rest days? Watch football on TV, play golf, or go fishing… But they are simply a distraction that we need so that we can continue to work. But what does our work actually consist of? Our work consist of selling, providing, making more of those things that others want as distractions from their work!!! (We are like Sysphus whose work was to roll up a huge boulder up the hill only to see it roll down so that he can roll it back up again…!)

No wonder Solomon said, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” Ecc. 1:2 Everything UNDER the sun, that is.

It is so easy to see Indonesia’s gods and goddesses. We think them foolish for going to the mosque 5 times a day. We are even saddened… But if they were here, they would think us foolish for wanting and needing everything we already have. They might even be saddened by our blindness….

I’m praying for myself that I will lose my appetite in everything else until I have an appetite for God. It’s only when my appetite for God is the greatest that my appetite for everything else will be good and holy. Until then, they are my gods that will end up destroying me and everything I treasure.

Treasure Jesus.

PH