“I learned that lesson my first year of marriage when I got my wife a dishwasher for marriage.”
At the beginning of Zoom sales calls, there’s often the small talk that accompanies waiting for the others who are supposed to be joining the call. You can’t talk about the sales process yet because not everyone is there, so what you are left with is everyone trying to be as friendly as possible and not feel awkward.
As I joined a call this morning, I entered a call of people talking about Christmas gifts. One of the guys was talking about the gifts that he gives to his wife and that he made the mistake of getting his wife a new dishwasher their first year of Christmas. He thought that since she was getting him tools, he would get her a “tool” also….aparently she was not amused.
As he continued to talk he started saying that he had run out of ideas of what to get his wife. He just got her different kinds of jewelry each year because “you can’t go wrong with jewelry.” As he continued talking, everyone on the call was saying their “mmhmm’s” and “yeps”. But I started to become more and more separated from what they were talking about.
Eventually, he dropped a bomb that had I not been on mute, they may have heard the audible gasp from my side of the screen.
“I saw a diamond bracelet for $6,000, so I’ll probably just get her that this year.”
I was in disbelief. It was a combination of not only how expensive it was, but how nonchalant and carelessly he talked about it. As if $6,000 for this trinket was just something he did. Each year he went to the jewelry store and paid multiple thousands of dollars for something just to keep his wife “happy.”
As I prepare to give my girlfriend a gift for Christmas and having just bought my gift for my family name drawing Christmas exchange, I felt almost sick to my stomach that someone with close to nothing would likely have the same reaction to me getting what I got for my family and girlfriend. I’m not a very attached person to things, yet even I was spending a fair bit of money on these gifts when people aren’t eating this Christmas.
It’s truly a hard balance. The fact that there are starving people around the world doesn’t mean that we should never have anything nice, but I do think it should cause us to think about the things that we do and the carelessness in how we do those things.
My initial reaction was to judge this man for his careless “rich person” attitude, but then I immediately was challenged with this in my own life and selfishness. It brought home the verse “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
Year number 23 of Joey being a hypocrite. I pray I can continue to realize these moments and come back to the Lord to sanctify me from these thoughts of judgment when I myself am just as sinful and in need of Jesus to purify me.