My husband and I are going to a fundraising gala on Saturday, and since I haven't worn formal attire since our 2003 wedding I decided it was time for a dress and all the trimmings.
Having accompanied my husband to the high school "prom ball" that he chaperoned last spring, my five-year old is a veteran of such affairs and immediately volunteered to pick my dress. While I wasn't willing to commit to the possibility of wearing a hot pink sequined number, I did agree to take her along for the ride.
So off we set this past unseasonably beautiful Saturday morning, me with a vision of something long and chic and her with a backpack full of lunch and lipgloss. In the time it took her to eat her turkey sandwich, Sun Chips and pear, we hit four boutiques (two of them of the consignment variety, a new concept to my daughter, who blurted out incredulously in one of them, "So all these things someone else has worn before?") and came up empty.
A bit dejected, I headed home to clean the bathroom. Cinderella, indeed.
Determined to find something (anything), I headed out for round two yesterday afternoon and quickly confirmed my hypothesis that there were no long gowns in the city of Louisville that were a) in my price range and b) not fit for a 17-year old "prom ball go-er" or a mother of the bride. Further dejected but growing a bit desperate, I grabbed a few cocktail dresses from a rack and headed to the dressing room, where one of them proved acceptable if not the long, chic vision I'd been entertaining since I first received the invitation to the event.
As difficult as it had been to find a dress, I had absolutely no problem finding lots of other things I loved, from red leather Frye boots to chunky beaded necklaces. Unfortunately, with private school and a new vehicle on our horizon, we have even less disposable income than usual, so I left all those things right where I found them. Yet I continued to think about them, long for them and pout about the fact that I couldn't buy them.
I was acting, I realized, just like my three-year old, who begs for a new toy everywhere we go. He's so automatic, in fact, that my response - 'You don't need a new toy. You have don't even play with all the toys you have' - has become the same. Talk about not practicing what I preach.
I don't need anything. I have shoes and clothes and cookware and furniture, all the things that turn my head in magazines and on shopping binges like the one I went on this past weekend, in excess of what I actually need to exist comfortably. But, just as my son always finds a newer/bigger/better dinosaur or car that he "needs", I constantly see newer/better/more stylish things that I think I "need."
Ironically, our minister's sermon yesterday was on the topic of sin. In it, he reminded us that Jesus suggested it would be better to cut off your hand or gouge out your eye if either caused you to sin than to continue sinning. I'm not sure if Jesus really intended for people to start lopping off appendages or if he was going for dramatic effect to emphasize the danger of sin. Either way, I see the application in my life.
Lusting for material possessions is sinful. That may be uncomfortable for some people to read - it's uncomfortable for me to write, like I'm standing up in an AA meeting announcing an addiction - but that was another pivotal point of the sermon yesterday: People don't call a spade a spade when it comes to sin. Too uncomfortable. Too harsh.
My love of things distracts me from what's important and makes me dissatisfied with all the good things that I do have.
So while I have no plans to gouge out my eyes (I could barely stomach removing a splinter from my cuticle recently), I can take steps to starve the beast. Step one will be abstaining from multi-stop shopping marathons. Step two will be letting a few of my four magazine subscriptions lapse. And step three will be declining the Pinterest invitation that I finally received from Ben and his cronies.
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