colossians
Image is a reflection of bars on a white wall. Credit: Unsplash/Bernard Hermant.
Currently, I am a prisoner willingly serving a prison term for terrible crimes I committed a long time ago and self-reported some years past. This prison season has been the brightest darkness I've ever known. Prisoners are exiled from healthy community and forced to grapple with toxic shame in isolation. The same is accompanied by a pervasive loneliness that can be overwhelming.
Macy's has caused a Thanksgiving stir by opening stores on the holiday. littleny / Shutterstock
Macy's decided to open its doors to shoppers on Thanksgiving Day at 8:00 p.m. Time magazine reports that people are denouncing the move as “greedy, misguided, and unfair to the employees being forced to work on a day traditionally reserved for family.”So how is Thanksgiving doing? Is it deceased, or has its death been greatly exaggerated?
The apostle Paul must have wondered about this when he wrote his letter to the Colossians, a group of Christians living along a main roadway in Asia Minor — what is now modern Turkey. They were pulled between the values of their faith and the values of their culture, much as we are today. Paul warned them, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).
These words ring true today, don’t they? We know the philosophy of trying to spend ourselves out of economic troubles. The empty deceit of a sales pitch. The human tradition of making the holidays an orgy of consumption. The elemental spirits of the universe that lure us away from Jesus Christ.
Paul asked the Colossians, and he asks us, “Why do you live as if you still belonged to the world?” (2:20). It’s a good question, one that we should ask ourselves on Thanksgiving Day, and every day.