Living with a child with autism has taught me a lot about people, but mostly I've learned how profoundly broken we are. It is sometimes hard to see how selfish we are until someone very different comes along and breaks all of our rules. You see, my little sister doesn't care whose stuff she's touching, if she likes something she will inevitably gravitate towards it in an attempt to touch it, play with it...and potentially break it. With her and my brother with autism I have learned the materialistic selfishness of people-especially me-not primarily from watching their behavior, but from the responses they tend to elicit from the "victims" of their sticky-fingered exploits.

I, for example, claim to be following Jesus and I say that everything I have is a gift from God and ultimately belongs to God. God says to share, to give away, to loan with expectation of return. And yet when I am faced with someone "borrowing without permission" my first reaction is one of anger, frustration, or hurt. It is hard for me to realize that when someone else takes my things it is not me that they are stealing from, but God, and so it is none of my business. In fact, a God-honoring response would be one of heaping even more gifts on top of what they've already stolen, would it not? It seems I want to claim to be something different while still living like the rest of the world.

But it is even more frustrating to me watching other people's reactions to my thoughtless younger siblings sometimes. I shake my head in sorrow watching people get all worked up in anger over the temporary loss of some material thing that they never use, never needed, and barely remembered that they still owned. Why do things that do not matter become so important and so divisive when they are threatened or lost? What kind of security are we trying to find in accumulating things that cause us to feel so personally hurt and wounded over loss of stuff?

But it is not the fact that the world participates in this kind of materialistic security-seeking that makes me grieve as much as the fact that the church in America not only seems to endorse it, but even participates in it. We say stuff doesn't matter, but look at our churches, our books and music, our equipment, our land, all of our stuff that we "need" to do church right. We "need" all the nicest new stuff for kids programs, we "need" all the best sound equipment and computers and projectors for services, we "need" bigger, better, nicer million-dollar buildings to meet in, and when we don't get all of this stuff-or when it is taken away from us-we feel personally hurt, wounded, and even uncared for by God. I know He said He'd supply our needs, but who really thinks that means multi-million dollar buildings when there are tens of thousands of kids starving to death every day?

So whatever happened to literal interpretations of the Bible? People argue over whether or not the Bible literally describes a seven-day creation while completely skipping over Jesus's literal command to "sell all you have, give the money to the poor, and come follow me." That sounds like something to be taken literally, yet we can't do it, we can't live without the security of our stuff. No matter how much I get rid of, I can always come up with a reason to keep some of it, to hold back a little more and a little more from God. Why can't I follow a literal command that I want to follow, that I think I should follow? What has this commercialized, materialistic, capitalistic world done to my mind that I cannot let go? Why do my "needs" look like extravagant wealth to most of the world's population?