Hoarding

I had to double check the calendar. Had we somehow all scrunched into the Delorean and used our plutonium-powered flux capacitor to head back to the year 2020? Great Scott! It sure seemed like it.

My “Back to the Future” moment came as news stations were reporting toilet paper shortages at places like Costco. Sure enough, I went out to the Costco app to check out the situation for myself, and found that I was not able to order toilet paper for delivery as we usually do. This seemed weird to me, as just days prior I had managed to easily and seamlessly place an order for this very same product for my parents. So, like we do in this year of our Lord 2024, I went to Google to figure out what was going on.

As I’m sure many of you are aware, a labor strike (now over) at a major US port had been going on long enough that consumers were beginning to get nervous. So nervous, in fact, that some old habits we saw far too much of during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic began to reappear. Chief among them were panic buying and hoarding.

One post I saw online spoke to the situation uniquely:  “All Clear. Port Strike Over. Time to retreat to your TP fortress and reflect on what you’ve done.” I chuckled at the statement–internally agreeing–then took a moment to ponder why it is that we act this way.

I think we panic buy and we hoard resources out of fear. And I think that fear often comes from a place of genuine and deep discomfort with uncertainty. And while it doesn’t often make the news, I think there are many ways that our discomfort with uncertainty shows up in our lives that go well beyond bathroom tissue.

In the face of uncertain times, a scarcity mentality is often quick to emerge. Something happens–a relationship ends, a loved one dies, a job is lost, the car breaks down–something happens that rips the rug out from under us and causes us a great deal of pain and discomfort. We’re uncertain about what our lives are going to look like going forward. We aren’t sure that we’ll have what it takes to make it through. We doubt that we’ll be able to figure out how to fix the car, how to land a new job, how to move forward in the face of debilitating grief, or even how we’ll love again. 

In the uncertainty, we often find ourselves coming to a place of believing in our bones that there simply isn’t enough–not enough time, not enough money, not enough skill, not enough love available to us. And so we hoard–in some way, shape, or form. Thinking that if we can gather up and hold onto “enough” of whatever it is we feel is scarce at the moment, our world will somehow be set right on its axis once more.

We hoard our presence, believing that separation is somehow our safest bet. We hoard our problems, electing to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” and circulating debt between credit cards, believing that it’s far too risky and vulnerable to ask for help from another. We hoard the energy that we bring to our work, deciding that we’ll never again put all of our efforts into what we do for a living so that we’re never disappointed if it ends. And we hoard our friendship and even our love–coming to the conclusion that if no one knows us, then no one cares about us, and no one can break our hearts by dying or by leaving us in some other way. 

I think what we often find is that hoarding does work–at least for a moment. In the end, however, it is less effective. Almost always we will run out of whatever it is we are storing up for ourselves. The only way to truly have enough is to do the very opposite of what our knee-jerk reaction tells us to do:  We must lean into community and relationship even harder than before. 

I have to wonder if this is what John the Baptist was getting at when he said, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” Like, maybe John understood that the person with two shirts might eventually be someone who runs out of their own food and will need support from someone with extra food, so it’s a good idea for the person with two shirts to share their extra shirt because it will, in the end, benefit the community and–potentially–them self. Could it really be that our way out of scarcity is to share that which we have an abundance of ourselves, so that others are free to share that which they have in abundance?

I just can’t shake the notion that John started with simple, concrete items like extra shirts and extra food so that we’d grasp the concept enough to bring it into other areas of our lives. Like, if we can share extra shirts that we have with others, then we might be able to share less concrete things too. We might be able to better share our presence–knowing that someone else has no one present for them in a particular way. That person might have a connection to a job opening that they can share with someone who lost their job and is looking. The person looking for work might have so much love to give and time to give it more freely, that they be a sobering and steadying presence for another who is grieving or who is shutting down following a break-up. And the cycle goes on–each person doubling down not on scarcity, but on abundance–as they share what they have and receive what they lack.

So the next time life brings you to a place where you want to hoard–toilet paper or love or something else–I pray that you might consider a different way of reacting. Perhaps a way much like the Way John the Baptist pointed toward out in the wilderness–the Way that asks us to respond to uncertain times by leaning hard into community and sharing what we do have to share, so that others might be freed to share what they have too.

I’m willing to try fighting my knee-jerk reactions if you are.
Pr. Melissa

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