Its amazing what happens to your world view when luxury is stripped out of the equation. While prosperous times are by no means a bad thing, for they certainly are a part of life’s seasons, they can however begin to blur the lines between necessity and vanity, what we want, and what we truly need.
The current economic “crisis” is doing quite an effective job of delineating between need and want, and is yielding embarrassing (but not surprising) results about our value system. There is of course no shortage of stomach churning news about how bad things are economically, and how bad they are expected to get, but worst of all is seeing the resulting impact of improperly defined need. It is pathetic if a person would go so far as to fake their own death, to avoid the facing the reality of falling short of their financial aspirations (see also: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13plane.html ).
As much as we may try, it’s hard to not muddle need & desire; sometimes we want things so desperately and so deeply that they really feel like “needs”. When we stop thinking about day to day life in terms of mere survival, we begin to inflate the value of things we can otherwise do without. Below is Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, which was basically a psychological construct that ranks categorically what we as people need most and how we our priorities in terms of need dictate our world view. The bottom reflects the most essential things to life (need), the higher you go on the pyramid, the less dire the need is. What you may find, is that we all probably have inverted this structure in some major ways.
Something I’ve had reaffirmed over the past few months, is that my needs are quite simple, but slightly different that Maslow’s structure. My foundation starts with Salvation, above all I need Jesus, I need the presence and constant hand of my savior in my life. God is the gatekeeper to all my other needs, salvation yields confident reliance that all my needs will be met, and that all I really “need” is a healed and contrite heart. Only through an honest realization of my true depravity can I grasp my real need for a savior. When we begin to take seriously how incapable we are to handle even the marginal things independently, we can firmly attest all the more to how desperate our need really is to be saved.
The strange contortion of it all is that the more I realize that I NEED Christ, the more I truly and deeply WANT his intercession into every waking moment of my day. My need for God is self perpetuating; I need him more each day. I’m not sure what happens to the shape of the above pyramid when need and want coincide in Christ, however, I am confident that the need/desire for Christ becomes all consuming and the singular focus of all our efforts. The best part is that when we throw away Maslow’s construction, and transition to compete reliance on Christ, we end up never NEEDING and never WANTING anything more that we have, Christ is sufficient.
I would imagine that the hierarchy goes from a 2 dimensional triangle to a three dimensional sphere. Sphere’s have total balance, and if Christ is our singular focus he is all we need and he is all we want. When Christ is what we want, we never need any thing more.
Needily Yours,
CP
http://Chrispanoff.blogspot.com
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