Day Thirty Three: Visit to the Doctor

Saturday morning I woke up with a sore throat and a stuffy nose. By Sunday afternoon it had become a full out case of bronchitis. This morning I felt so bad that on Jen’s advice I went to the doctor. This is an unheard of action on my part. In the past, I’ve figured that you just have to tough out a cold. This is apparently not the case as the doctor gave me a shot, prescribed an antibiotic and told me to buy Mucinex D. He believes I should be feeling better by the morning. Total cost, $30 for the doctors visit, $60 for the medication and probably an additional charge for the shot which will come next week in the mail. I am fortunate. My health insurance is good, I work at a place that has compensated sick days (though today is my day off), and I have enough money to afford to go to the doctor and buy medicine. However, for someone who is not as fortunate as I am, this could be devastating. More than likely they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor because they can’t afford the health insurance, they couldn’t afford the prescriptions that would help them get better so they prolong their illness, and they couldn’t afford to take the time off so they either lose a weeks wages or they may face losing their job. A bad cold for me means I spend a few days feeling lousy, a bad cold for the working poor could mean finding a new job.

Day Thirty: Hospital Visits and a Starbucks

I am always a bit taken aback by the quantity of Starbucks that survive in such close proximity to one another.  Today in the hospital district I found three Starbucks all within the same two blocks.  Grant you, only one was a  stand alone Starbucks which had taken over a bank building and converted to a coffee shop.  The other two were in two different hospitals, one in Harris Methodist and the other in a tucked away corner of Cooks Children’s Hospital.  You may be expecting a rant here about the consumer driven market or how a chain coffee retailer has so ingrained itself into our society that it manages to thrive in any location it opens choking out Mom and Pop coffee shops with it’s inferior coffee, but this, strangely enough, is in support of the global chain.  I can’t imagine a better place for a Starbucks to be than in a hospital.  These are places which care for people whose whole lives have been torn apart in an instant.  This is where you find people who have had the strangest day in their lives, where one minute things were normal and in the next they or a loved one was in the hospital.  They have suddenly been torn out of the normal world and thrown into this strange place where people poke and prod and take blood and force you to wear those backless gowns; where you often face massive problems or have to make tough life altering decisions.  This is the perfect place for a Starbucks to sell coffee.  Why?  Because Starbucks offers something familiar in a completely foreign environment.  The Starbucks in the hospital can prepare for you the same low fat soy latte that you can get on any street corner in the world.  It provides you with the same service, the same atmosphere, the same uniforms, the same smells, tastes and sights.  In a place that is so unfamiliar, so foreign, stands something normal and familiar.  It is comforting for people who desperately need comfort.  It is something like the Gospel in a consumerist world.

Day Twenty Nine:

With an icy chill in the air and a carpet of snow on the ground, I give thanks that I am fortunate enough to have a roof over my head and a heater that works.  Pray for those who don’t.

Day Twenty Eight: A Loaf of Bread for $2.99

I went to Target to purchase a loaf of bread for our staff communion service today. Because of my current resolution, I tend to get excited about making a purchase. It has become something of a novelty, something that I enjoy and put thought into. Today, as I picked up and closely inspected my ninth loaf of bread, one of the employees asked if they could help me find something. I responded, “No, I’m looking for the right loaf of bread for communion.” This I’m sure sounded odd to the woman. How often do they encounter someone so carefully inspecting bread, let alone saying that they need it for communion? I wonder if they were even aware that their bread could be used for communion. The whole situation is odd. Here is a seemingly normal young professional picking up and inspecting fifteen different loaves of bread in the middle of Target during the lunch hour trying to find the perfect loaf to serve as a symbol of the body of Christ. I wonder if Jesus ever pictured something like this when he told his disciples to “do this in remembrance of me”? And yet it is in the middle of this odd situation that I was reminded of how amazing the sacrament of communion is. How a simple loaf of bread and some grape juice shows us the unwavering, unconditional love of God. How in each time we take it we are participating in a sacrament that billions of people have participated in for two thousand years. How with each piece we are all in some incredible way becoming part of the body of Christ. How Jesus sat in a room with his closest friends and broke a crisp piece of unleavened bread, something similar to a large cracker, during a passover meal and said those words, “This is my body broken for you,” and at each communion service we sit at that same table and share in that life altering moment. In the middle of the bread section at Target I am thinking all this and am reminded of how a month ago I would have looked at this purchase as a chore, an inconvenience in the middle of my work day. But today I inspected fifteen loaves of bread trying to find the perfect loaf for the sacrament of communion and realized that it would be worth going to five stores to find the perfect one.

Day Twenty Seven: Things We Need to Buy

There has been an increase in discussion between Jen and I, mostly on my end, about the items we need to buy after Easter.  I think it is driven by my anticipation of Easter which is just around the corner.  I’m aware that the end to our resolution is drawing near and I’m beginning to anticipate entering back into the world, so to speak anyway.  I have even gone so far as to make a list ranking items we “need” by their level of importance.  The list is as follows:

1) Repairing the driveway (which in all sincerity is tearing up the bottom of Jen’s car and needs to be done as soon as possible)
2) Buy chairs for the custom made Amish dining table which as of yet has not been delivered (This is a weird concept to me as we have not seen the table or payed for it yet).
3) Finish buying items on registry (I think this is more about a sense of accomplishment than actual needs, but I don’t remember what is on the list)
4) Buying a scooter (by my calculations, this will pay for itself in just two years if gas prices stay below $3.00, if they rise it will pay for itself sooner)
5) New wardrobe (both Jen and I want to look fabulous for one another as we just got married)
6) Update laundry room with cabinets, tile and bead board (One of the many ongoing home repair projects at the Bellamy home).

There is probably more stuff, but this is an adequate example of the things we have discussed (some in more detail than others) in the past few days.  Some of the items on the list I think we can justify purchasing without much hesitation, the driveway for instance which is really much more than a cosmetic purchase, it is honestly beginning to do some damage to Jen’s car.  And there is some obvious fluff on the list as well, a new wardrobe for instance. 
But then there are things like the chairs which we will need, eventually.  There is not much point in having a nice dining table if you can’t eat around it.  Of course, we already have a small dining table which we don’t eat at very often.  Or in the case of my scooter, which I have considered purchasing for the past year and have carefully laid out the pros and cons.  The scooter really is the most inexpensive and practical means of reducing my gas consumption and my impact on the environment in my daily commute while still allowing me to make pastoral visits or run errands when necessary.  But Jen and I carpooling to work once a week, as that is all our current work schedule allows, would do that as well.
And I guess that I could say that all of this centers around the question, how do you define needs?  This is a question that Jen and I have been dealing with the whole time.  But I think that there is something more to it than that. 
For the past month, we have been refraining from buying anything but the necessities as a means of removing ourselves from commercialism.  We have gone to the extent of defining ”necessity” to varying degrees, though we fudge a little along the way (I bought a bottle of wine for dinner on Monday which was one of the reasons I did not post an entry).  But have we been doing this in vain, the whole time making tiny list in the back of our heads of things we “need” to buy once Easter arrives?  Does this really accomplish what we set out to accomplish?  Have we really been successful in removing ourselves from a commercialized society, if only for a short while, or have we been participating in it this entire month by subconsciously making lists of things we “need” though none of them have been purchased?  Do you have to buy things to fully participate in an overly-commercially driven society, or is simply making a list of things you “need” enough?