I had a wonderful awakening last year. After 50 years on the planet, I woke up and realized that my training as an obedient consumer had lulled me into an artificial lifestyle that was lived at the command of people, governments and corporations that I don’t even know.

 

It all began a few years ago as I stood in the yard at a friend’s house at a social gathering on a Sunday afternoon near Limassol, Cyprus. I was looking out over the Yermasoeia Dam and watching the people fishing and rowing boats, when a surge of desire rose up inside of me and I thought, “I want to live more deliberately.”

 

The thought of living more deliberately has led my husband and I to seek a more Biblical perspective on every aspect of our lives. The status quo of our western culture has so influenced the thinking of Christians that the goals and ways of achieving those goals has been adopted without a shred of discernment. We are raised in a system that gives us a certain measure of comfort and security. We do not realize how much freedom we have compromised spiritually, socially, and politically.

 

It is not a stretch to say that if you compare a Christian and a non-Christian, they will both want the same job and the same money for the same reason resulting in the same purchases of consumer goods and services that produce the same sense of getting up and going to work so you can live in your house so you can sleep there and get up so you can go to work, and so on ad infinitum. Then the Christian and the non-Christian will both indulge in the same forms of entertainment, regardless of the lewdness or blasphemy presented in movies, books and computer games. Does this mean that the only advantage in being a Christian is that when you die you go to heaven while the non-Christian goes to hell although you both have lived essentially the same lifestyle?

 

Growing up in western culture with well-meaning parents meant that my father labored to give us the things he didn’t have as a child. The nice house, pretty clothes, good private schools, and some social status related to his position with the company were what I was taught by example was the goal in life. My parents did not meditate on the meaning of life, and I never heard them discuss the realities of their lifestyle that resulted in the same alienation from each other and the children that had become so common in the sixties and seventies. They did love each other and they did love us children, but there was nevertheless a “generation gap” that was punctuated in the family circle with misunderstanding and a lack of communication.

 

All of this can be traced to the birth of consumerism and its effect on the family. Since the advent of catalog shopping and the consequent disdain for handmade or homemade items we have been shaped as a society for the function of consuming mass-produced goods. In the early years of my parents’ generation, there were still a good number of families on the farms of America, growing their own food and raising their children with a large degree of independence. During their lifetime, they saw the mass exodus of young people of working age from the rural areas to urban jobs and eventually to suburban living.

 

It seemed to me as I was growing up that the main task in life was to get a good education that would prepare you for a specialized job (the more specialized the higher the pay) that enable you to buy the things you wanted so you could live happily in a materialistic world. As I got a little older I began to realize that not everybody earned enough money to make their dreams come true and thus they lived in perpetual frustration. Of course, the nagging question at the back of everyone’s mind was, “Is this all there is to life?”

 

The question of purpose and meaning in life began to emerge in my thinking and eventually led me to embrace Christianity and more specifically, to embrace Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord. The small beginning I made years ago with that decision has meant that I have grown to have a perspective on life that separates me from the average non-Christian. I have to question materialism and consumerism, because I know that life is more than what we eat or what we wear. Jesus said in His Sermon on the Mount that we were not to seek the same things that everyone around us was seeking because God knew what we needed before we even asked.

 

 

I have come to the conclusion that consumerism is both a state of mind and an imposed state of being. If we are convinced by our culture and all of its advertising propaganda that we are made for the purpose of consumption, then we are reduced to the present condition of helpless people who depend on the world system for everything from our food to our houses. Then the main activity of life should consist of amassing enough paper called money to buy those things that will fulfill every desire. The reality is, though, that once we acquire a good amount of stuff, we find that it is never enough and we are left unsatisfied by the elusive goal of being satisfied by things.

    

Consumerism is an imposed state of being because in order to pursue the status quo of society, you must act like everyone else and get in line for jobs, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and public education. You essentially stop doing anything purposeful for yourself, and become dependent on a system that is both all-consuming and vulnerable because it is unsustainable.

 

The unsustainability of consumerism is evidenced in the rising prices of commodities because they are becoming scarce. We are using up the material substances of this world in an extremely fast manner. What will be left for future generations if we use up the rest of the raw materials on this earth in just one or two generations?

 

Consumerism is also unsustainable because it requires a pace of life that is out of touch with nature. The cycles of life on this planet, the rhythm of walking on your own two feet, the seasons of the year, the day and night of 24 hours, and so on are obliterated by electric lighting, shift work at factories, automobiles, and imported out-of-season foods. The distinctions that have made life interesting for humanity over the past thousands of years have been made null and void by the pace of industrial society and consumerism.

 

I have wrestled with consumerism in my own soul. It was part of who I was for so long, and then by God’s grace, I woke up. I am now journeying toward a different future so that my future descendants can live free and meaningful lives. I am thoughtfully dismantling my preconceptions about what is necessary for life, and coming to new conclusions that are making me free to walk with integrity in my Christian life, with a new distinction between what I am pursuing and what the non-Christian is pursuing.

 

Aimee Hennen