Looking down, not up!

There's an old proverb that Dave's mum used to quote to him when he was growing up. It went like this: I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

A similar thought (though a little less extreme!) hit me a few years ago as I was sitting in a Bible study group. Somehow, instead of thinking about the passage in front of me, I got distracted and found myself looking at some particularly nice shoes that a couple of the women in the group (married to well-paid professionals) were wearing. I've always had a 'thing' for shoes, and these ones were very nice. I can't remember what they looked like now, but I can tell you that it only took a few minutes to convince myself that I really needed a pair of shoes just like them.

But then my eyes wandered across to some of the other shoes in the room and I noticed that some of the other women (who, as it happened, were married to Bible college students) were wearing shoes that looked like they had seen better days. They were worn, scratched, and out of fashion. I looked down at mine. Perhaps mine weren't the newest and most fashionable in the room, but they were certainly adequate. In fact, all of a sudden, they looked a whole lot more than adequate.

I remember realising with an unpleasant jolt how instinctively I gravitated toward comparing myself with those with more money than me, not less. I wasn't looking at the women in the group who were making sacrificial decisions with their money and wanting to be like them. I was wanting to run in the other direction.

Needless to say, I didn't go out and buy that pair of shoes! But it's easy to slip into old habits of thinking. Sometimes it's something as 'innocuous' as a new pair of shoes; other times it can be on a whole different level. When the family next door (with two children) extended their home recently, I started to wonder if our family (with three children) should follow suit. After all, surely we would need more space too, since they obviously needed it so badly. Then I remembered some friends with four children, who live in a flat half the size of our house and not only survive, but have made it into a welcoming home.

All this came back to me recently when I read an old Briefing article by Sandra King called Not Keeping up with the Joneses - the Christian Practice of becoming Poor (reprinted in Beyond Greed):

Contentment is something to pray for and to learn (Php 4:11). Instead of letting our eyes glance longingly towards what our neighbour has (and why do we only ever compare ourselves with our wealthy neighbour and not our poor neighbour?), we should set our eyes on the Kingdom of God. Instead of setting our hearts on treasures that rust and rot, we should set our hearts on the treasures of heaven (Matt 6:19-21).

She then goes on to provide some helpful and practical suggestions for ways to become purposefully poorer, in imitation of Jesus.

Pics from stock.xchng.