Adopting a Wartime Lifestyle
By Audrey Stallsmith
I’ve been reading an old John Piper book titled Don’t Waste Your Life. As one of those people who frequent library book sales, I often pick up such books 20 or more years after they were published! But the ideas in this one don’t seem to need much updating.
Piper obviously believes that we Christians shouldn’t be wasting our money any more than we should be wasting our lives, and something he said about a wartime lifestyle struck me. Even though our country theoretically is at war just now, most of us definitely aren’t experiencing the deprivation that the greatest generation had to endure.
Granted, we have to pay more for gas and, due to that, more for almost everything else. But we aren’t subject to the rationing that took place during the early 1940s, which probably was even more severe in England than it was here. I remember Dorothy Sayers writing about the wartime mantra “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
The reason those on the homefront did without was, of course, so that more supplies could be sent to those on the front lines. And even though Piper’s book came out about the time of the Gulf War, he wasn’t writing about a war between nations but about the fight for souls. Much more could be done on that front too, he points out, if Christians didn’t waste so much of their money on the unnecessary.
We seem to have become a bit detached from our national wars now that they are fought by professionals and often from a distance. And perhaps we erroneously believe that the battle for souls is being fought by professionals (the missionaries) and at a distance too.
But there are plenty of lost souls a lot closer to us than that. As the late Dr. Ralph Winter once pointed out “The 8000 members of the Friends Missionary Prayer Band of South India support 80 fulltime missionaries in North India. If my denomination (with its unbelievably greater wealth per person) were to do that well, we would not be sending 500 missionaries but 26,000. In spite of their true poverty, these Indian believers are proportionately sending 50 times more cross-cultural missionaries than we are!”
(Dr. Winter’s comments also were written over twenty years ago, and I’ve heard that the financial situation in India has improved during the intervening years. We will just have to hope that, as the people in India get closer to our lifestyle, they don’t get closer to our level of overconsumption too.)
In her essay called “Why Work?” written during World War II, Sayers asked “Can you remember—it is already getting difficult to remember—what things were like before the war? The stockings we bought cheap and threw away to save the trouble of mending? The cars we scrapped every year to keep up with the latest fashion in engine design and streamlining? The bread and bones and scraps of fat that littered the dustbins—not only of the rich, but of the poor? The empty bottles that even the dustman scorned to collect, because the manufacturers found it cheaper to make new ones than to clean the old? The mountains of empty tins that nobody found it worthwhile to salvage, rusting and stinking on the refuse dumps? The food that was burnt or buried because it did not pay to distribute it?”
To that, I have to say “Uh, Dorothy, I don’t have to remember because that’s the way things are today. Except maybe we are more likely to scrap old electronics than old cars these days.”
I’m one of the offenders myself since I tend to buy produce and then forget about it until it’s too old to use. If it’s not too bad, I sometimes make myself eat it anyway so that I will make more of an effort to remember next time. (Aging mushrooms explain the depressing gray hue of the rice casserole I’ve been consuming most recently.) And it only recently occurred to me that I probably could actually chop and freeze celery, one of the vegetables which fades fastest, to use later in my soups.
The fact that celery doesn’t cost much isn’t a good excuse for wasting it. As Chesterton notes in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks "Economy is essentially imaginative, because it is a realization of the value of everything. . .the real objection to waste is that all waste is a kind of murder. . ." In fact, “waste” is slang for “murder.”
Since I tend to stick my leftovers inside old opaque plastic yogurt containers where I can’t see them and they mold away in secret, perhaps I should opt for glass containers instead. (Yes, there are instances when the more expensive option is the more economical choice.) Any bits of money I save by not wasting things could be contributed to something more important such as the missions’ offerings. And bits often add up quickly when you get enough of them.
But then there’s the even more sensitive subject of wasted lives. We all need occasional entertainment to give us some relief from work. However, if we fritter away too much of our lives in front of a screen of some sort, rot can set in quickly there too. When I asked Google’s AI for the average amount of time people spend on their smart phones every day, it specified 4 to 7 hours.
Although I don’t have a smart phone, the fact that I get so many of my answers from AI these days is probably an answer in itself as to whether I spend too much time on my desktop computer. When I’m writing articles, I can justify that. When I’m simply scrolling through all the latest MSN feeds, not so much!
So, I’m thinking maybe budgeting is the answer, not just budgeting of money but budgeting of time. Some of us already have gone through at least three fourths of what is allotted to us, after all. So, if we want to make our contribution to the war for souls’ effort, we’d better get started soon.