It all started with cookies in the break room. Now, keep in
mind, there are always cookies in the break room. Well, usually anyway. And
okay, it’s not always cookies but brownies, doughnuts, pastries of some kind, whatever,
will be found in one of our office kitchens. This is not unusual – every
company worldwide has little office elves that fill it with excessive
carbohydrates and other terrible things.
But here’s the thing: these particular cookies weren’t very
good. This doesn’t mean anything, cookies are cookies and sometimes they get
dried out or sometimes the vanilla proportions weren’t up to par or maybe they
were overbaked rendering them dry and crumbly. It’s not really important. The
important thing to note is that the free cookies in the break room were not
that good…yet they were eaten anyway. All of them were gone by around noon.
It interested me. As an avid calorie counter and a dessert
connoisseur, I’m interested when cookies are good and when they’re bad. If
they’re bad, I won’t eat them. It’s too hard to expend the cost of the calories
that one of those not too great cookies represent. But it seems that not
everyone else feels this way because all of those so-so cookies were eaten
without lack of thought or interest. They were just…consumed. And it made me
think. Forgive me for turning cookies into a philosophical statement, but I
wonder how many other things we mindlessly consume just because they’re there?
It appears to me that American culture has a lot of garbage
in it. It’s all created for the masses, for people who don’t care about much of
anything at all. From reality TV shows that showcase anything from Amish people
to suburban housewives living one dramatic fantasy lie, to movies that essentially
are one big noise, to songs that make no sense whatsoever and involve mostly
more loud noises, there seems to be not too many things of value out there
today. And it’s the valueless things that seem to take up more and more of the
minds and hearts of the greater population. Forgive me for possibly sounding
old and cranky (I am not old, I AM cranky) but what exactly are we putting on
our plates here? Even our food is mediocre, created to be shoveled in in mass
quantities without much taste. We buy without thinking, we eat without
thinking, we dress according to current trend not according to principle, and
we consume whatever comes along even if it’s corrupt and not fit for
consumption.
These trends concern and alarm me. The culture is rotten. It
stinks. So why then, do we consume it without thinking? Why are we so eager to
spend ourselves and our dollars on mass media and mass-consumerism that adds
essentially zero to our lives and in fact, is detrimental to our souls and to
ourselves?
As Christians, we have a duty to ourselves and to Christ to
treat our temples with respect. This speaks for both the inward and the outward
part of us – the mind and body are two separate segments of one temple. Yet so
often we just fill both our hearts and our bodies with garbage, without even
thinking about it. Sometimes we don’t mean to and other times we just don’t
care. This is what bothers me. As Christians, we should care. We should never
expect for the culture to just float us along – it can’t. It will fail.
Today’s culture is not worth consuming. It really isn’t.
It’s the equivalent of the dollar menu from McDonald’s; cheap and something you
just eat to keep from dying. And so I have to ask today, what are you putting
on your plate?
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