I woke at 2.30am on Friday morning with a food hangover. It was my birthday on Thursday and I may have overeaten just a little… or a lot…
So at 2.30 I lay in bed unable to sleep and after half an hour of tossing and turning I decided to get up and go do some preparation for what I was teaching on Sunday – a talk on contentment – part of a series on ‘Living Well’.
I do the major part of my teaching prep on Fridays and I quite often wake at 4 or 5am and get the jump on the day by working in the quiet hours. But on this particular morning I was about an hour into the work when I noticed something curious happening. I was preparing a talk on the importance of contentment and the constant niggle of discontentment that seems to infect our western lives.
So I took some screenshots of the Bible passages I was working with. Check the screenshots below and see what you observe…
So you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the Gumtree ads in the sidebar showing me advertisements for old cars. There were four ads for classic cars followed by an ad for spare parts for old cars – because anyone who is gonna buy one of these suckers is going to be forking out plenty in that department!
But then the final page I get shown is for a Maserati – complete with $154K price tag. It seemed to be saying ‘well if these old girls don’t impress you then surely this will!’ CLICK NOW!
I must confess I have a love for old cars and I have skimmed Gumtree occasionally sniffing around seeing if there are any XA Ford Coupes going cheap – see the top pic. (Not that I have anywhere to store one…)
Bu what struck me was the great irony of sitting in silence at 3.00am and preparing a talk for a church community on the perils of discontentment and even in that space I couldn’t elude the hooks of desire for something more. Someone knows me and sees me and is going to hook me in with the hope of something better out there…
And I did click!
I saw an ad for an old Monaro for $6K. The car looked spectacular – too good not to look – so I left the sermon on discontentment and went to see what this car was like. It turned out the seller had used a picture of an already restored car to show what his could look like if the purchaser had a bottomless pile of cash and endless time to spare! Ha…
But for me it was just a valuable picture of the world we live in as we seek to follow Jesus and live differently. There is no escaping the lure and promise of a better life, and unless we engage deeply with the biblical story and a Christian community I’d suggest we are going to buy that lie too easily. We are constantly being ‘discipled by the culture’ and it is not leading us into contentment.
An old proverb says “When we pursue happiness we flee contentment”.
By contrast when we see all we have to be grateful for we can live with peace and joy, but you have to get past the lies you are fed every day by the clever people in advertising!
Interesting. I normally run ad blockers, so seldom see adverts, although a while back I re-opened a faceberk account and was being fed adverts for busty singles dating alongside notices about famous people having died (they hadn’t). Make of that what you will.
My expectation is that any kind of advert appearing alongside real content will always provide false advertising, whether bait & switch like you experienced or something more sinister like trafficking ‘Russian brides’. While I may find some of the things shown in those kind of adverts interesting, though TBH they really have no idea about my tastes in women, I couldn’t ever consider clicking an advert because I KNOW it’s never going to deliver what’s apparently promised.
Contentment. Being happy with what you have instead of chasing an illusion. That was a pretty good example. It’s funny how, so often, sermon prep tells us as much about ourselves as it helps other people.