BLACK FRIDAY

BY STEVE DUNN

I admit it. I did some shopping early on Black Friday. I was at the Verizon Store at eight AM to try purchasing a new smart phone at a discounted price. I also dropped in at a LIFEWAY store to pick up something available only on Black Friday that I wanted to give us a Christmas present. Before this, the only time I had entered a store on Black Friday was at Walmart several years ago at 6 PM.

The mea culpa goes a little deeper. I stopped at Kohl’s at 5 pm on Thanksgiving itself to pick up a package for Dianne that she had purchased on-line in the “pre Black Friday” sales and ended looking for some inexpensive Christmas presents. (To be clear, our Thanksgiving celebration had been over for several hours and the only thing the trip conflicted with was the Cowboys-Redskins game. Dianne was down for a late afternoon nap, so relational time was not lost and I had spent time earlier in the day reflecting on and expressing my thanks to God for his blessings.

Sorry if this changes your opinion of me for the worse.

Black Friday has become a cultural tradition in the US, which lately has faced some backlash pushing some of  "Friday" starting on Thanksgiving evening back a little later and causing some retailers to return to a Friday start itself. (A.C. Moore, Christopher and Banks, Costco, Home Depot, IKEA, Lowe's, Sam's Club, Staples were among the 70 retailers who chose to wait for Friday.)  Part of the temptation are the deep discounts and as early as we can get to them, we want to do it. (Ironically now, a lot of retailers like Walmart, Kohls and Amazon have had "Black Friday" on-line for several days now.

Hopes for an inexpensive Christmas shopping season are not in themselves a bad thing (unless you overdo it and max out your credit cards). The irony is that we place so many hopes on a commercial holiday and go to great lengths to realize them and often ignore or downplay a more important Black Friday.  It's one that occurred long before the birth of our consumer culture.  It was the Friday that Jesus went to cross and a dark day on a hill called Calvary, poured out his life so that we might have eternal life.  Today we will call it Good Friday but I guarantee on that day in Israel before the Resurrection, it was the blackest day of all for thousands who had put their hope in Jesus.

The hopes we will realize by a successful shopping season WILL FADE when the wrapping paper is scattered on the floor beneath the tree, or when what we paid so much for is broken or obsolete, or something equally finite is created to long for something new.

But there is only one Black Friday that offers eternal savings.

© 2018 by Stephen L. Dunn. You have permission to reprint this provided it is unchanged, proper authorship is cited, it is in a publication not for sale, and a link is provided to this site or to www.drstevedunn.com. For all other uses, contact Steve at sdunnpastor@gmail.com