lifeasmission

Black Friday

November 27, 2006

A good friend of mine, Jay, got it in his head a while back that on Black Friday, we would make cookies, brew some coffee, and cook up some hot chocolate and take them all out to people standing in line through the night attempting to take advantage of all the sales and deals that stores offer on the morning after Thanksgiving.

Personally, I would have just assumed going to feed the homeless or something like that, but I think this was something of a test for me.  Basically, Black Friday disgusts me.  It is like the embodiment of all the hyper-consumerism and materialism that I think plague Americans.  But, as we got closer to going I felt like God was asking me if I was willing to serve the same people who live and breathe the culture I aim to critique. 

So, with 200 cookies baked, we (Jay, Wendy, Babs, Carrie, Ryan B., and I) met at 3:30 in the morning, made our hot drinks and headed for Best Buy.  It was an interesting, but great experience.  Less than 1/2 the people we served asked who we were or what we were doing.  Most assumed we were with Best Buy.  We didn’t do it for recognition or even to try and illicit conversations or anything like that.  In my opinion it was more of something to benefit us, a practice that hopefully serves to help us become a certain kind of community.  We have already started taking about what we might do differently next year – definitely making more cookies as we were done in about 40 minutes.  There must have been 2000 people in just that one line.

Anyway, I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.  Here’s some pictures.

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Posted in: culture, friends, western culture