Not So Black-and-White Friday

I remember my first Black Friday. Now, remember, I am Canadian, so we never had this uniquely American experience growing up in the land of the glorious and free. Our Thanksgiving is way back in October and back then Christmas creep hadn’t quite made it that far. Now it stretches all the way till Valentines Day, but that’s another blog—I digress.

I LOVE Black Friday.  As a more-or-less urban individual, it is the closest thing I get to the age old instinct to be a hunter/gatherer. I no longer have to scrounge the brush to chase out prey, tracking and killing so my family can eat. Now, the closest I get to that primitive instinct is to wake much before dawn while the merchandise prey is afoot, sniff out the wonderful 2-for-1 deals, steadfastly track its location, beating out the hungry competition, and score the kill… err… I mean, save dozens of dollars on quality goods and services.   I’m a true warrior and I have to admit to the occasional howl of victory when I have finally felled my prey!

But back to my first Black Friday. I was newly married and we spent Thanksgiving in Monroe, Louisiana. It was a season for culture-shock, so why not throw one more on the pile.

“So, WHAT time do we need to wake up????”

There I was, still trying to digest the fried turkey I had recently discovered the day before. Around me were crowds of humanity, all sharing with me the brisk fall air in this pre-dawn wasteland. 5 o’clock was approaching and all around me were preparing for action. It was all so foreign and exotic to a simple, naive Canadian boy-man.

“What is it that they are giving away again?”

“Some kind of ornament, I think,” says my hot, new beautiful wife, whom I would do anything for… including stand here in this growing mob scene.

And then, like the flag-waver at the Indy race, or the trumpet blower at the epic battle, the doors swung open, and…

and…

and…

Have you ever seen one of those movies where the cinematography suddenly becomes fractures, like watching a scene through a strobe-light effect? Every time the picture flashes, there is some crazy fight, or action and then… BLACKNESS. Then another strobe and everyone has changed places, and fists are flying, and swords are blazing, and then…. BLACKNESS.

Ok, maybe that’s a tad dramatic, but that’s how I remember it. There was pushing, and scrambling, and running, and scampering, and more pushing, and hurt feelings, and fallen victims, all racing on the wave of humanity towards the perceived goal. This free ornament that, at that moment was more than the sum of its simple parts. It represented in that brief glimpse in time, everything that was promised to a first world patron. It was the sum of the American dream. It was the holy grail of “I’m gonna get me my share.” It wasn’t just a next-to worthless piece of glass and ribbon. It was the promise of free, and luxury, and keeping up with the Jones. It was what was owed to us all…

…that is, unless the jerk standing slightly in front of you didn’t take the last one.

How dare she. It’s probably what she has been planning all morning!

Maybe for most of her life… and mine. Maybe she’s the apex of all the injustice that I have experienced in my life. Maybe she’s committed herself to follow me around my entire existence to simply make sure that my lot in life is one of unfair circumstances. Maybe her placing herself between me and what’s owed to me is just the final straw in a serial of mean-spirited greed. That is simply UNACCEPTABLE! She can’t get away with this!

…Maybe I should push her!?!

No, I didn’t really think that, nor did I push her (at least not maliciously), but it did open my eyes on the baseness of our human condition. As we pushed forward in that “on the edge of a mob scene” scenario, I saw first hand our… that is my… flimsy grasp on true thankfulness and gratitude.

If you’re like me, this gets played out every year in Kid’s Church. We spend weeks going against our kid’s natural instinct to want to get what they have coming to them (or so everything in our society has led them to believe). We teach lessons about how they need to be thankful to their parents, and their church, and oh yeah, don’t forget God! They learn how the reason for the season is Jesus and how we should never forget it. We do outings and shoeboxes and random acts of kindness, and all this amongst the glowing lights of consumerism that picks up every Sunday afternoon where we leave off.

Talk about frustration!

But aren’t our kids just a representative of our own values? Don’t they have a purer sense of displaying what we spend our lives either promoting or battling? They live in the same society we live in and they fight the same battles, internally and externally, that pits the fallenness of our hearts against the holiness of our calling. It’s enough to frustrate us, and discourage us …

…and to set the stage for a genuine Christmas miracle.

You see, amidst this whole angst of first-world struggle and the greed of our human condition and the lust for all things that can be “mine”, there is a power that all greed and selfish desire cannot compete with. That juggernaut is simply grace! While we were powerless, Christ died for us. That’s what it all comes back to. Love that was expressed through the ultimate sacrifice. It produced a force that despite all our frailty and all our lack and our our raw baseness that we spend so much energy trying to hide, still leads us to a place where we can stand blameless before a holy God.

Grace is, in fact, our saving grace!

So I will continue the hunt in my love of Black Friday (as long as you don’t get me railing against the evilness of this new “Black Thursday”!), and I will continue seeking to suppress my greed while both feeding it and repenting from it. And I will keep teaching my children about the power of thankfulness and gratitude that should stretch beyond the turkey table into the retail lines, and I will start my celebration of this most holy of seasons based not solely on how thankful I am…

…but based on the amazing grace I have been given!

And I didn’t even have to fight a crowd to get it! Remarkable!