Pastor's Blog: The Deadweight Loss of Christmas
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Over the last several years I’ve done a remarkably good bit of reading from economists weighing in on current affairs. Funny, I had always connected economists with market trends and financial projections. But in recent days I’ve been impressed with how many of these individuals have taken their quantitative analyses and turned them to matters that go way beyond mere assets and liabilities.
For example, several years ago, Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota, focused his economic insights on calculating the value of Christmas gift-giving. What he discovered was that from a purely economic perspective, such gift-giving is irrational. It doesn’t make sense. The satisfaction (or in economic lingo, the “utility”) a person derives from the process is determined by personal preference. But no one understands your preferences as well as you. In other words, if I give you a gift, the chances are good that you’ll never value it as much as I think you should. Say I spend $100 on such a gift. The probability is high that you’ll value it as less than that. Waldfogel goes on to say that on average, people value their own purchases 18% more than they value items they receive as gifts. But before you conclude that maybe you should dispense with gift-giving this Christmas season, Waldfogel suggests that you consider cash or a gift card, even though he recognizes that 10% of gift cards never get redeemed.
In my humble opinion, where I think Waldfogel and other economists may be wrong is when we come upon gifts that those on the receiving end desperately need and would never have considered buying them for themselves. If you’ve ever hit the mark with such a gift, you know that the “value” both you and the recipient feel is incalculable.
My takeaway is this: you cannot experience the full value of a gift unless you have a place for it in your life. As far as Christmas is concerned, you can’t receive hope or peace or joy or love unless you know there’s a place in your soul that is empty of these attributes and needs someone to fill you with them. And thinking that you can achieve them on your own becomes an oppressive burden, a deadweight that you will never be able to lift.
Perhaps that is why so many can go through a season like Christmas and feel cheated, even when, materially speaking, they got everything they asked for. But all the while they have not been aware of their deep spiritual need for renewal and restoration so that they take the gifts they have received, stick them on a closet shelf with other unappreciated presents from Christmases past, and move on into the New Year no better for all the effort that went into what they were given. Actually, this tendency may explain the growth of “gag gifts,” a gift so worthless that you laugh when it gets opened. After all, why go to the trouble of knocking yourself out to give something to someone, when they probably won’t appreciate it in the first place?
Fortunately, as people of faith, we have another variable to add to the gift-giving equation, one that might be unknown to nonbelievers but is foundational to us. It is the variable of God drawing near in the Bethlehem Baby to grant us the grace necessary to experience His salvation, something we couldn’t purchase, earn, or attain for ourselves. When we stop to consider how every gift we give or receive in this special season symbolizes the redemption God has made possible in Jesus, then everything that comes our way proclaims a grace that when accepted with a thankful heart, never goes unappreciated or unused.
Let that thought encourage you as you take your health into your hands going out to find the perfect gift for those people on your list. Even more importantly, let it inspire you as someone gives you something that he or she really didn’t have to do. Most importantly, let it flood your soul and fill whatever emptiness might exist with a reminder of your greatest need that God has fully filled in Jesus Christ. Only then will this Christmas be everything you ever hoped it would be…and so much more.
“For by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).