why we don't have a clothes dryer

Last week my daughter, who was searching for a dry top to wear, asked me why we don't have a clothes dryer (it broke last year, and we chose not to replace it - which, by the way, causes little inconvenience). I'd usually say, "We can't afford it", but I answered, "Because we choose to give money away." I was inspired by what I'd just read at in tandem:

Chester issues a challenge to think about having less. This may mean choosing to work less hours or not take the promotion, in order to have more time outside of work. It may be choosing the smaller house over the larger one, so that we don’t have to work so hard to pay for that larger mortgage. It may mean no longer reading “Better Homes and Gardens” or similar, and learning to be satisfied with the home that you have.

I think this is something that those of us in ministry should be striving to model. Consumerism is so rife we hardly notice it anymore. But we need to find ways to model it that are honest. If people think we have less because we cannot afford it, we are sending the wrong message. Ministers (at least those in the Western world) are generally not poor, we are paid enough to live on (and often much more than that). We need to be able to explain why we choose to spend less on some things, it’s a choice. Most ministry families who cry “poor me” have little understanding of true poverty.

Yep, I needed to hear that, and so did my daughter. Thanks, Wendy.

From Wendy's post The Busy Christian...chapter 11.

image is by DanielleCM at flickr

what I'm reading: a cure for materialism from Chesterton's Orthodoxy

Do you remember Puddleglum in CS Lewis's The Silver Chair? Do you remember how the witch tried to convince him that the only reality was her underground world: that there were no stars or trees, and no Aslan? Do you remember how Puddleglum answered her?

"I've seen the sky full of stars. I've seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I've seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn't look at him for brightness ... Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. ... That's why ... I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan."

I wonder if CS Lewis had been reading GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. For Chesterton's arguments against materialism (the belief that this world is all there is) remind me of Puddleglum's:

Most modern thinkers ... take one thin explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black. ...

[The materialist] understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. ... It is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. ... If the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk. The deity is less divine than many men; and ... the whole of life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. ...

The main deductions of the materialist ... gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human.

I'm with Aslan - and Jesus.

quotes are from CS Lewis's The Silver Chair and GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy 20-23

image of Puddleglum is by Pauline Baynes from CS Lewis' The Silver Chair; second image is by Robert the Noid at flickr