I’ll tell you how to beat the gambling in Las Vegas.
When you get off the airplane, walk right into the propeller.

HENNY YOUNGMAN

I do not read advertisements.
I would spend all my time wanting things.

FRANZ KAFKA

One morning our remaining son, Jeff, held up the newspaper and said, “Dad, look!” It was a full-page advertisement for a wide-screen HDTV. A TV that would fit perfectly along our south basement wall. Bold numbers were scrawled across the TV: $44.

“Dad, look, we can buy one.”

I said, “Read the little print below the big print. That’s forty-four bucks a month until the year 2349.” His eyes grew wider as he read the small print. His dad was right.

I thought to myself, Of all the bad habits we are teaching our young, few are worse than the notion that they can have it all now. That good things come to those who pounce. And borrow. And max out their credit cards.

We’re paying our Visa bills with our MasterCards so we can impress people we don’t like with things we don’t need and get air miles that we can’t use thanks to blackout dates. When money enters the equation, our brains short-circuit. We get dumber than a sack of hammers. I once saw an advertising slogan in a bank: “We will lend you enough money to get you completely out of debt.”

For the first time in world history, Americans and Canadians are spending more than we make. But what culture of any worth loves its economy more than its children? Remember the word wait?.

Flying into a beautiful city in California, I looked out my window at all the massive houses. Many of the garages would dwarf entire houses of thirty years ago. The average American residence now has three more rooms than the homes of twenty years ago. I think I know why. We need bigger houses because we’re having so many kids. Whoops. Maybe not. Fifty years ago the average couple had twenty-seven children, give or take a dozen. They had to issue nametags. Not anymore. The average couple now has 1.7 children. My daughter points at my son and says, “Him. He’s the point seven!”

We need bigger houses because we want to impress others, and we’d like more room for our stuff. We’ve never had more stuff in the history of mankind or womankind. We’ve become stuffaholics. We measure success with a stuffometer. We have pants that talk. They’re made in Great Britain. They simply say, “Zip me” (maybe some of us need these). We have cell phones that work underwater. What an answer to prayer! We have clocks to shine the time on our ceilings in the middle of the night. They’re an insomniac’s dream. At some point each December most of us, me included, scratch our heads and ask, “What do we get for the person who has everything?” Here’s a radical answer: How about nothing? How about an arm around their shoulder, a kind word, and a glass of iced tea together?

New York writer Liz Perle McKenna decided on a most unusual way to declutter her life. For her fortieth birthday party, she invited friends to come to her house and take one thing of their choosing.13 Most of us are thinking, I’d sure like to be her friend.

Would someone please explain to me who convinced us that we would be happier chasing stuff than enjoying relationships? Because that’s what we’re doing. We have more shopping malls than high schools now. We spend more money on pet food than missions. As Richard Swenson says, “The good life now means the goods life.”

But how can we know if we have enough stuff? Thankfully, advertisers, who really care about us, have a handy little form we can fill out. It’s called:

The Stuffometer Questionnaire

(Sponsored by the same guys who brought you the slogan “You’re worth it.”)

   How much stuff do you have right now?

   WHAT? Are you COMPLETELY INSANE? Do you have sawdust for brains? It’s not NEARLY enough.

   We’ll be right over.

The advertising industry is waging a nonstop bombardment on our minds. They spend billions creating discontent, convincing us that we are miserable creatures. You poor thing You do not have a water filter for your cat dish. How do you live without one? Buy one today, and well throw in a free nose-hair trimmer for your gerbil.

I saw an ad on TV recently for a beautiful luxury car. A well-oiled narrator said softly, “The only cure for temptation is to surrender to it.” And I thought, Now there’s a noble creed to live by. Does that mean I can scratch your car? I was tempted.

Buick once tried to sell us with the slogan “Buick: Something to believe in.” Hmmm…we can now worship at the First Church of the Buick. Take out your Owners Manuals, and lets sing together from page 33.

Then there’s the ad with a guy holding a beer can. Without slurring his words, he says, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Pardon me? If this is as good as it gets, we’re a miserable lot.

I prefer the old ads. Like the one I once saw in a newspaper. It said, “Used Cars. Why go elsewhere to be cheated? Come here first.” Here are a few more of my favorites:

And so we are left with a choice. Store up for ourselves treasures on earth where they need fixing, storing, insuring, painting, maintaining, rustproofing, and constant attention. Or we can follow Jesus’ advice in Matthew 6:20 and store up for ourselves “treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

Here are a few ideas to start us down the road to debt-free living and a place called Peace.

   Take a child by the hand and go for a walk. Make sure it’s your child.

   If you are in debt: (a) make a budget, (b) pour lighter fluid on your credit cards, (c) light them, and (d) then use cash for all purchases. Ask older people about cash; they know what it is.

   Buy bottled water every twenty-three years. At the corner store near us, you can buy “a taste of paradise” water from Fiji on sale for $1.50 per bottle or $11.36 a gallon. We spend less than one-third of a cent per gallon for water that comes out of a tap twelve steps from our bed. If you buy two bottles of water a day, you can save $1,095 a year by taking along your own plastic bottle and filling it up with tap water—water that most of the world would give just about anything to drink (by the way, Pepsi recently admitted that Aquafina comes from…are you ready?…a tap).

   Boycott Starbucks. If you buy five lattes per week for a year, you will spend $1,040. Stop it. If you need caffeine, buy $40 worth of beans at Safeway and suck on five a day. My boss does this, and I rarely catch him napping.

   Get married and stay married. According to a report by the Journal of Sociology14 (get ready, big surprise ahead), marriage actually increases your emotional and financial health. “Scrapping a marriage robs you of wealth,” claims the study. After surveying nine thousand people, they found that divorce reduces a persons wealth by 77 percent and that married people increased their wealth about 4 percent per year.

   Avoid frugal-living books. I picked one up recently, and here is a sampling of the brilliant advice: Buy a goat for milk! (I kid you not—no pun intended.) Invite the grandparents to visit—they’ll bring gifts for the kids! Don’t take your children shopping! Cut open your toothpaste tube! Reuse your trash bags! The book was on sale for twenty bucks!

   Support your church, missionaries you know, needy people, and organizations that are making a difference.

   Leave the TV off during dinner. Don’t hurry through dinner. If you do, it might hurry through you.

   Teach your children that we need money to buy things. If we don’t have money, we can’t buy things.

   Put memories ahead of money.

   Meditate on Micah 6:8, Revised Materialist’s Edition: “What does the Lord require of you? That you act justly, that you love mercy, and that you run, run, run like a gerbil.” No! That you “walk humbly with your God.”

When Steve came home for a weekend, the five of us sat in the living room talking. For some reason the issue of money surfaced, so we reminded our teens of our fiscal philosophy. We told them we’re investing in organizations that are focused on eternity. We told them we’re not leaving a bunch of cash behind, so they’d better get jobs. I told them what was in our will. It says this: “We, being of sound mind, spent all our money.”

In fact, the last check I write will be to the undertaker. And it’s gonna bounce.