I can't speak for the rest of humanity (not until they elect me emperor, anyway), but I think my attitude is marked by a drastic lack of perspective.

I listened to Tim Sanders, the Leadership Coach for Yahoo!, Inc. this week at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. Sanders talked about the concept of the "scarcity mentality," and, while he spoke specifically as it applied to business, I couldn't help but feel that a little futher from my back pocket and a little closer to my thorassic cavity. In a world where eight minutes of every half-hour show (that's 26% of your TV-time) are spent telling me what I should buy and why I'm not complete without it, I've come to believe that I'm operating in scarcity. Despite the full refrigerator, the chest of clothes and the two cars parked in the driveway, I wake up in the morning and wonder how I'm possibly going to make it. I put on my Levi's, shave with my Mach 3, down my Diet Coke, hop into my Toyota, turn down my Aiwa as I talk on my Nokia and sip on my Starbucks, and I wonder how the heck I am going to make it for another day.

And I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, what we call a drastic lack of perpective.

I have more in my life than 90% of people on this planet will ever know...as Tim Sanders said it, "when you are pondering your misery over lunch and you bite into your sandwich and there's meat in it...you've just entered the very small minority of fortunates." It's freeing to know to actively realize that I have never once not had food when I needed it...not once. The closest I came was when we went sledding in Jr. High and we were out there for several hours and I had forgotten to eat breakfast and my stomach began to hurt because I was hungry but there was no food around for miles and good god what are we going to do? Fortunately, I found a tin of string fries in the back of Neal Kennedy's station wagon on the way home. Crisis averted.

In Matthew 10, Jesus says, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." I needn't worry about dying of hunger...the odds are that an upper-middle class American guy with a college education is most likely not going to starve to death...and even if I were to face some extreme financial downfall, I have Biblical assurance that God is still looking out for me. So why all the worry? I dunno...perhaps our lives of luxury have left us without any REAL corporal challenges to face, so we're making them up. I doubt it, though...I think we're just convinced by every newspaper, billboard, nightly news program and commercial that we are constantly in jepoardy. And I think I'm starting to resent that...

Peace,
Justin