stewardship | Amy Medina

I’ve always been a fan of yard sales and thrift stores, but a couple of years ago I discovered something truly marvelous: estate sales.

Are you familiar with estate sales? This isn’t your ordinary yard sale where you’ll find mostly junk and the occasional treasure. An estate sale is when the entire contents of a house is for sale. Like, the door is open and you go into the rooms, the closets, and cupboards. You can buy anything that isn’t nailed down.

I find these sales using EstateSales.net, and there are sales posted in my area every month – sometimes every week.

Estate sales have taken the palace of Target runs for me. I barely ever use Amazon either.

Gil and I keep a joint running list on our phones of things we are looking for. Buying things this way means that we often have to wait a while before we find it. But if we’re patient, we can find almost anything. Here are a few examples of recent purchases:

Paper shredder
Trifle bowl
Beach towels
Deck box
Shoe organizer
Waffle iron
Dog harness
Mini crock pot
Suitcase & duffle bags
Flatware utensil set (an extra set for hosting large groups = no more plastic forks!)
Whirley Pop Popcorn pan (I was so excited to find this – I had been looking for over a year!)

All of these things were purchased in excellent condition and at a fraction of the original cost. Almost every item in our home was pre-owned, and we have saved thousands of dollars this way.

Plus, it’s fun! Our city has lots of old Victorian homes, so even if I don’t end up buying anything, I enjoy getting a peek into these exquisite houses.

But there’s one more reason why I’m a fan of shopping this way: Estate sales provide me with a built-in caution against buying things I don’t need.

I spent my first years of life in suburban California, and I assumed every person on earth had a TV and a bike and a refrigerator that magically produced food. As a fish doesn’t know anything besides water, I couldn’t conceive of anything besides middle-class.

I moved to Liberia when I was six years old, and the boy on the other side of our fence ate frogs out of the swamp when his family ran out of food. I met girls who walked miles to haul water while I walked to my privileged international school. I later lived 16 of my adult years in Tanzania, where my rickety van and millepede-infested house felt like luxury. I didn’t have a dishwasher, a dryer or central air conditioning, but I had electricity and plumbing, and that lifted me above most Tanzanians.

I was a fish out of water, gasping for breath at the dichotomy between my life and theirs.

Now I’ve been back in America for two years, and I find myself slowly captivated by the middle-class ocean. The voices calling me from billboards and magazines and screens are persistent: You need more. You deserve more. It’s your right. I don’t want to listen, but I do.

Americans make up only 4 percent of the world’s population yet hold 31 percent of the world’s wealth. As a little girl, I dreamed of being a princess, and then living in Africa revealed to me that I already had royal status. How Rich Am I? tells me that even on my ministry income, I am richer than 94% of the world’s population. That can only be defined as aristocracy. 

Americans spent over 10 billion dollars on Halloween this year, which is more than the entire GDP of 60 countries. Americans will spend around 900 billion dollars for Christmas, which is more than the GDP of 173 countries – all but 17. Just Christmas. Scientists estimate that if everyone on earth lived the lifestyle of Americans, it would take five planet Earths to support them all. Guess that means I should be “glad” most people are poorer than Americans.

Yet when I drive through neighborhoods of houses that look just like mine with a Starbucks and a Panera on every corner, when everyone around me goes to Disneyland and Outback Steakhouse, I struggle to put my head above the water and remember how most of the world lives. It’s easy to fool myself into believing that just about everyone has what I have, that I am in the majority. Or perhaps I’m poorer than the majority since I can’t afford pedicures, cruises and designer purses.

A friend in Tanzania wrote to tell us that he hasn’t had a job for a year, so could we front him the money to start a new business? And my immediate thought was no, because I just found out this morning that my child needs braces.

And my next thought was that I just chose braces over my friend’s desperation to put food on the table and pay school fees for his kids. 

I like to pretend I’m not wealthy. Jesus said that to whom much has been given, much will be required, so if I’m not rich, He can’t require much of me. I can hunker down and pay for braces and not worry about people who need the money more than I do.

Read the rest at the EFCA blog.

Tag: stewardship

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