good evening. welcome to world news tonight...

i'm a little bit of a news junkie. basically... i just need to know what's going on. i think this started when i was about ten... desert storm was going on and my class adopted a soldier. i remember standing in front of the tv, being mesmerized while i watched peter jennings (RIP) report from the battle lines every night. maybe it was because i wanted to see if i could spot my soulja boy or maybe i just wanted to be a smarty pants about it the next day at school... who knows. but to this day, i tune into the nightly news regularly and check drudge report or nytimes.com every couple of hours... juuuuust to make sure the earth is still on it's axis and spinning as usual.

about 20 minutes ago i was checking drudge... it's no secret that the headlines lately have been IN RED and constantly talking about the FINANCIAL CRISIS that is crumpling down around us and quickly spreading like wildfire around the world. seeing all these headlines got me thinking... why is it that we FREAK about money more than anything else?? i can recall having two panic attacks in my life- both about money. it is something that every person i know- whether well off or maybe not so much- deals with on a daily basis. it's like without enough of it (and everyone's 'enough' is different), it is so hard to be settled or secure or at peace. this is true ESPECIALLY now... people who have staked their lives and futures and whole beings on these little green rectangles of paper have just recently lost it all... and all our perspective is going down the drain with it.

if i could live in any time in our history, it would be the 1950's. #1 reason: american bandstand. #2 reason: everyone seemed as though they were on the same page (financially speaking). for instance, there were no car leases. if you had the cash to put down on a car, you got one. if not, you did without until you could afford it. you clearly still had your very wealthy and your very poor, but there was this huge middle class where everyone lived in the same boat. it seems like the majority of middle america had the same sized houses on the same little street, drove similar cars, ate at home as a family, drove to the nearest "watering hole" for little vacations... cokes were a nickel, maybe you earned an extra 25 cents mowing lawns so you could splurge on some baseball trading cards and you were set. no one really needed anything else. further, there weren't a whole lot of other options. NOW it's a completely different deal. NOW basically anyone can have anything they want- a la credit cards- and there are about a millllllllllllllllllllion choices and people keep hiking the prices up because they can... because if the dress has a certain person's name on the tag or the shoes have a red bottom, people will pay ANYTHING for it. does that seem odd? or remember when you waited alllllllllllllll year to ask santa for that ONE THING that you wanted because THIS was the time to ask for it and you would be sooooooo good so that you could be on the nice list and receive it christmas morning? well now it seems like kids get whatever they want whenever they want it and christmas doesn't even have that same impact as it used to.

and so in light of all these generalizations i've just made :), i'm choosing to see this MONETARY MELTDOWN as a good thing. instead of melting down myself, i'm going to see it as a necessary means to get ourselves back to neutral. example: last week i bought a pair of awesome (faux) snake-skin heels for five dollars. five. dollars. they were regularly $80. and you know what? i liked them so much that if they had been $80, i probably would have paid it. but they clearly weren't even kind of worth that! we are just so used to seeing these jacked up pricetags that it's no longer a big deal! so i feel like all this cost cutting, price dropping, streamlining, efficiency scramble seems like maybe the right idea. it's time for us to start living our lives realizing that stuff is stuff and just because you can pay $80 to $800 for it, doesn't mean you have to.

and going back to perspective... the verse in matthew chapter nine, verse 24, has recently taken on a whole new meaning. Jesus was addressing the issue of financial stability versus following Him and He said, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." that makes so much sense to me right now. when you're set on the money front, you tend (i definitely tend) to not need Him so much... because YOU pretty much have it covered and YOU can do this whole life thing on your own. whereas, if you are wondering where your next meal is coming from, or how that electricity bill is going to get paid, relying on Him and the promises He has made to us start becoming your one and only Truth to stand on.

so bring on those bright red, underlined, scary news headlines... i think i'm starting to like them. but not as much as those $5 shoe sales...