93% of People Who Have Ever Lived Would Gawk

At how we live.

My neighbor is spending tens of thousands of dollars building a huge storage building in his back yard. Workers are showing up. Materials are being unloaded. Hours are being spent. He’s building a barn-sided storage shed on a postage-stamp sized lot.

Certainly his right. No argument there.

But I’m going to make a bet: I’ll bet he never uses most of what he stores. I’ll even go one further: I’ll bet he never uses 99% of what he stores.

Oh yes, he’ll arrange it nicely, place everything in see-through bins, keep it out of the rain, and keep it organized.

And in his mind’s eye, he’ll use it one day. It will come in handy.

And he’ll think, “Even if I don’t use it, my kids will one day.”

But I predict it will be thrown away or donated by his kids when they clean out his space.

And I only say this because that is what I did when my dad passed. As great as their stuff was, as much love as they put into purchasing it, as carefully as it was stored—we donated almost everything. Me and my siblings didn’t need the clutter.

This is, to me, a snapshot of our age. We have too much. We live in an age of abundance and prosperity and overage and excess.

Our challenge is storage, not survival.

Our challenge is too many clothes, not mending the ones we have.

Our challenge is too much food, not scavenging for enough.

We begrudge a company for a late delivery. After we sat at our comfortable desk, clicked a picture of what we wanted, received notifications of its passage to us, packaged in a cardboard box ten times its size, carried by a grown, courteous man to our welcome mat, gingerly placed twelve inches from our door, and had its picture taken to prove it’s delivery … and we begrudge. We complain. We bemoan some aspect of this process.

This is our new reality.

We presume that this is just normal when 93% of all the people who have ever lived on this planet would gawk. They’d listen to the story of how this package arrived at our front door and their jaw would drop, their eyes would glass over, their mind would go blank at the sheer audacity of it all. They would be speechless because they had to fight for existence. They labored for food. Only danger arrived at their front doorstep. They didn’t build storage … they built shelter.

And we get persnickety when the package is late. We don’t even have a sense of humor about what we’ve become accustomed to. We don’t even chuckle after we lose our cool. We feel no embarrassment.

We actually think we are entitled to it. We think we’ve earned it.

I would argue no. We haven’t. I would argue that we live in a propped up, inflated, unsustainable, unreal, stock-market-supported world.

And of all the possible things we can do in this world—of all the possible reactions we can have—it should be this: We should be grateful.

We should stay grounded. We should have perspective on this amazing time we live in. We should temper our impatience. And we should have a sense of humor about it.

We should scold ourselves for complaining when Pandora takes more than three seconds to buffer.

We should rebuke ourselves for demeaning a waiter for less than five-star service.

We should temper our annoyance with all the crap on TV.

We should think about giving away instead of building barns for storage.

Because not everyone gets deliveries at home.

Not everyone even has a home.

Not everyone struggles with space to store stuff.

Let’s keep things in perspective. Perspective, baby! Perspective is what brings joy. Perspective will keep us in the humble pocket. And perspective will keep us in God’s eye and God in our eye.

I want to do better. I want to choose less. I want to give more. And I want to thank God for the life I lead.