Wednesday, January 4, 2012

62

62 lonely socks.  They are a symptom, and I am not proud.  A symptom of our own excess.  A symptom of overstuffed, seemingly bottomless drawers.  A symptom of lack of a laundry system.  A symptom of the ease and thoughtlessness with which we race through life.  Can’t find any more white socks?  Nothing the next trip to Target won’t solve.

I dumped those socks on our kitchen table the other night, with the preface that they were not meant to deliver a message of guilt.  The pile was intended as the first skirmish in a shock and awe campaign.  Here’s what I wrote on my sticky note:  62 unmatched socks X $2.50 per pair = $155 of unusable socks.  62 socks is just over 12 pairs of unusable socks per person in our 5 member family.  That’s about a week and a half’s worth of socks per person that will end up in sock purgatory (otherwise known as a paper grocery bag) unless it is happily reunited with its missing partner.  Sadly, these socks may be just feet away from their forsaken partner.  Maybe their mate is shoved to the back of a disorganized drawer, maybe it’s in a partially empty sleepover bag.  Or lost in a toybox. Or, or, or…

I couldn’t even get to my next wave of shock and awe because by this point the two big girls were nearly teary eyed and moaning, “Mom, you said this wasn’t a guilt thing!”  I assured them it was for shock value only and that if they were feeling badly, it was God poking their conscience. 

I didn’t even get to make my more meaningful point.  That same $155 invested (in the loosest sense of the word) in matchless socks can now only be repurposed as sock monkeys or dusting cloths.   What I wanted to say is that, at 24 cents a pop, that $155 would have been enough to pay for 646 meals at Feed My Starving Children.  One meal packs the equivalent of a day’s nutrition for a child.  Keep working the numbers and it means that one child could eat for an entire year, and another child for 9 months more.  All for the price of 62 unmatched socks in our house.  That’s ridiculous.

But the point is really not about socks.  It’s about unused, unnoticed, unappreciated excess.  It’s about partnerless socks as a catalyst for change.  {You don't get to 62 socks over night.}  It’s about good stewardship of all that God gives us, even socks.  Think about what “all” means.  It means the whole ball of wax – all of our money and possessions, the 24 hours of each day, the gifts and talents we are born with or cultivate, our passions, the people around us, all of creation.  What we do with that “all” is our gift back to God. 

Let me say right now, that I am saved by God’s grace through faith, not now and not ever by what I do.  Jesus died on the cross for me.  And my husband.  And our girls.  And you.  And our neighbors.  And 143 million orphans.  That free gift, unmerited and imbued with love and grace, ties to an economy of stewardship of which I am barely scratching the surface.

That’s what 2012 will be about for the McPherson family:  good stewardship of the gift of Jesus.  For the next months {form and substance to be determined as we discern what God has in store for us}, our family will be embarking on a journey of good stewardship, not for our sakes, but for the sake of Jesus.

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