A mother of four children was busy running errands one afternoon when she saw a sign in the window of a truck. It read, “The more you know, the less you need.” As she pulled into a parking lot, the phrase gave her pause, and she stopped to consider whether she really needed the items she was going to shop for.
Like many of us, this mother found that advertising had blurred her distinction between wants and needs and many of her days were crowded with the effort to accumulate more. In the chase for material prosperity, we, like this mother, often follow fads, compete for social status, and overspend.
The poet William Wordsworth described this problem when he wrote, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours.”1 As we scurry to accumulate material things, we forget to smell the roses, to gaze at crimson leaves against the blue of an autumn sky, to slow down and listen to the very young and the very old. If, at the end of another exhausting day, we fall into bed and very little of our time was spent lifting the lives of others or appreciating God’s wonders, we have forsaken our knowledge and bought in to the message that simple necessities are not enough.
If we were to keep a close communication with God throughout our day, however, how often might we pause before a purchase and realize it’s simply not needed? Might families climb out of debt and might parents have more time to parent if we ignored the siren song of yet another sale? Perhaps life would be simpler, richer, more satisfying and purposeful if we simply closed our wallets and walked away. The more we know about God’s plan for His children, the less of the world we need.
Program #3926
1. “The World Is Too Much with Us,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, vol. 2a (1999), 360.