As a Christian of Chinese heritage, it is a struggle to know what to do in the year when Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, coincide with the start of the Lunar New Year. For this year, I recalled a Chinese tradition that helped me make a compromise. Growing up in Hong Kong, we were required to clean our homes from top to bottom and got rid of stuff that we didn’t need. So, on Ash Wednesday, the day before the first day of the year, I cleaned my apartment, which I felt was a very appropriate thing to do. Then I discovered many things in my closet that I didn’t remember owning! This got me thinking: how much stuff is in the closets of every household in the United States?
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their book Scarcity, called this forgotten stuff “closet castaways” and they “are so common that space, not money, becomes the scarce commodity. People need to rent out self-storage facilities to house all their stuff. Some estimate that over $12 billion is spent annually on self-storage, three times as much as is spent on music purchases. In fact, the United States has more than two billion spare feet allocated to self-storage space.”
What happens if we think of these things as resources and invest them back into our communities? Here is a story that can help us imagine how closet castaways can become resources. Awhile ago, I was given a tour of the Life Enrichment Center in Dayton, Ohio, the mission of which is to “Work in collaboration with area-wide partners to provide life building, life sustaining services to the under-served in the greater Dayton community.” As part of their health and wellness program, they have a fully equipped gym in which people were working out, having conversations, and building social and physical wellness. I asked the tour guide, a United Methodist pastor, where the equipment came from. His eyes twinkled and with a big smile, he said, “It was easy. I made announcements at the local churches and invited people to go through their garages to see if they have any gym equipment that they were not using. In a couple of weeks, we had a fully equipped gym!”
Imagine 2 billion square feet worth of closet castaways reinvested back in our communities. And once we clean out our giant closet and no longer need the storage space, imagine 12 billion dollars of storage fees being set free to be invested back into our economy!
For Lent this year, I invite my readers to find ways to reinvest your closet castaways back into your communities to create social, economic and ecological wellness. Share this with your friends and invite them to do the same this Lent. Maybe we can start of movement that can slowly convert this massive forgotten static stuff into dynamic useful resources for creating sustainable communities.
To learn more about these kind of innovative ideas for ministries, I invite you come to our Holy Currencies Training this Spring - March 19-24 in Los Angeles. See information below.
|
Upcoming Opportunities to Study with The Sustainist and learn more about Holy Conferencing: March 19-24, 2015 April 21-25, 2015 July 20-25, 2015 November 1-5, 2015 |
|
Reflection Questions for 1st Sunday of Lent (Year B) Genesis 9:8-17 Psalm 25:1-9 1 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 9:2-9 |
Eric H. F. Law
Kaleidoscope Institute
For competent leadership in a diverse changing world
www.kscopeinstitute.org
Comments