For as long as I can remember, I have felt compelled to collect.
Probably the earliest instances were Muscle Men, Garbage Pail Kids, and Micro Machines. Then came basketball cards of all brands on offer. In high school, it was 1:16th scale die-cast sports cars, followed shortly by an all-consuming obsession with Kenner/Hasbro Star Wars action figures. In adulthood, the collecting has scaled back substantially, but still awakens periodically in seasons-- Nintendo cartridges, vinyl records, and even fully digital fighting-pets (read: Pokemon) have all had their moment.
Certainly there has been some OCD involved; completing a set is a checklist-checker's dream! But the driving principle that arises most consistently, and most prominently, is undeniably that of scarcity. Whatever the category du jour, the greatest dopamine rush inevitably has come through pulling the hologram insert card, or bagging the shiny Snorlax, or waiting in line for the short order LP reissue from my favorite band on Record Store Day.
Not even my car is exempt; it couldn't just be an Accord; it had to be the highly limited corporate-only model that offered six cylinders, four doors, AND a stick shift. To this day I enjoy driving the car, but its rarity makes me delight in simply owning it.
Why the preoccupation with scarcity? I believe that in a world of seemingly limitless abundance, it has been my way of dropping an anchor, of finding signal amid the noise, of feeling special within an incomprehensively massive (and ruthless) universe. And though the various things I have collected over the years are ultimately just things -- at some level, vain and even silly materialistic preoccupations -- I believe the impulse is an echo of something greater, something worth exploring.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus likens the coming Kingdom of Heaven to two objects of great value: a pearl of great price, and a treasure hidden in a field. In each instance, the subject sacrifices everything to lay claim to his precious find. Taking the parable on its own terms, this tells us something about humans: we have been endowed with an innate desire to possess the rare, the special, the uniquely valuable. Unpacking the parable, though, we see that this human compulsion for value finds its fulfillment in God's Kingdom, or even -- connecting the dots with other scripture -- in having a relationship with God himself. Jesus Christ himself is the Pearl of Great Price.
— Matthew 13:44
There is much that we could say about the interplay among scarcity and abundance, glory and vapor, value and dross. Although we look forward to walking with God in perfected eternity, our present pilgrim days are strictly numbered, and therefore they are imbued with a different kind of value -- but a value nonetheless. Our time is scarce. While we await an inheritance kept in heaven for us, imperishable, undefiled, and unfading -- our energy and our work, as well as the media we use to store it (that is, our money) are all subject to entropy and decay. Our energy is scarce. Finally, while we revel at the incomprehensible bigness of the transcendent God, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable -- we also acknowledge the immanence of his incarnation, the focused intent of his love, the exacting price of his forgiveness. So, paradoxically, we can also say that in a sense God himself is scarce.
And yet, all is not well on planet Earth. Increasingly, it seems, we live in a world in which the scarcities in our lives are under assault. Our money is being constantly devauled through fiat inflation. Our time is siphoned away through technologies intent on capturing and monetizing our attention. Our work has been devalued through relentless and insatiable corporatization, disconnecting our labor from its fruits. And our culture and values are being aggressively devalued by a prevailing philosophy that knows nothing of the God upon whom scarcity itself depends.
How can we possibly right the ship? In a word, through intentionality. We must be awakend from our passive slumber to an intentional reclamation of human scarcity.
This blog, then, is an exploration of the things which matter the most -- scarce things -- and how we we might recover them. It is an exploration of the scarcity of human time, the scarcity of human energy and work, and the scarcity of God himself, and it seeks to explore those scarcities across the vectors of Money, Technology, Faith, and Culture. (And occasionally some worthless plastic for good measure). Ultimately, these musings are not intended to be an end in themselves; rather, the goal is that we emerge with a greater sense of the value that is all around us -- the value of our days, the value of our relationships, and the value of our work -- so that we might live with purpose, urgency, and gratitude before the face of God who has so graciously given them to us.