Black Friday Stampede

Did you hear about the Black Friday incident where a Wal Mart employee was trampled to death by a crowd of people trying to get inside the store? It was a mob scene when the doors opened at 5am, driven by what police describe as a mentality of “They’re not going to cut in front of me.” The end result: broken doors, bodily injuries and one man dead.

My first response: what a bunch of lunatics, materialism run amuck, sheer stupidity. But as I thought more about it this week, I have come to another unnerving conclusion: I see myself in them. You and I have the same “me first” mentality they exhibited. We may not run over people at Wal Mart in the wee hours of the morning, but at the core, we all share the same attitude driving those early bird shoppers.

Who among us hasn’t gotten upset when someone wildly cuts you off in traffic? Who doesn’t get a bit heated when a woman at the grocery, cart overflowing with enough food to feed an army for a month, rushes to get in front of you? Who doesn’t get steamed when cars keep zooming past you, only to cut into your slow moving line of traffic two cars in front of you, causing it to slow even more? All of those things are an affront to our self-importance, to the “Me First” dwelling in all of us.

The bottom line is, the Black Friday stampede is merely a symptom of a deeper problem we all share; a sinful, self-centered, selfish nature. If left unchecked, as seen last Friday, it will harm us and others.

It’s a reminder that we really do need Christmas; not the materialism but the manger. It demonstrates our need of a Savior, for Jesus who came so we can have forgiveness of sin and the power to change from the inside out.