Law of Pockets

The Law Of The Pocket

If no one has come up with this spiritual law before, I’ll call it Jeremiah’s Law of the Pocket and introduce it right now:  “Personal possessions expand to fill the empty space in all available pockets.”  As I use the pocket as a metaphor for our lives, see if you don’t agree.

It seems to me that the more room we have (the more pockets we have) in life, the more stuff we accumulate to fill up that room.  For instance, think about how families progress through life.  Their first house is usually small, and the young couple barely has enough furniture to fill it up.  But eventually they do, and pretty soon, as children come along, they need more room.  So their next home is larger—perhaps it has a basement, a walk-in attic, or a spare bedroom—and all the regular rooms are much larger.  They laugh and joke, shouting “Hello-o-o-o” as their voices bounce around the empty rooms.  “Wow, we’ll never fill this place up!”  they predict.  Then before they know it, their two cars are parked in the driveway because the double-size garage is full of stuff, and every room on the inside is packed to overflowing too.

None of us means for this to happen, but it just does.  Its Jeremiah’s Law of the Pocket:  “Personal possessions expand to fill the empty space in all available pickets.”

From the very beginning, the most important purpose for pockets was to carry one’s money.  After all, people didn’t have all the gadgets and papers and things to carry around that we have today.  With easy money to be made with a cunning hand, thieves—pickpockets—made pockets their target.  But, as we move though life, instead of our pockets getting filled with more and more money that we can use to build up God’s kingdom, out pockets fill up with the things money can buy.  We dig deeply in order to give to the Lord’s work, but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot there.  Somehow we always seem strapped when it comes to giving money to God.

Let me therefore suggest that all of us have—or should work toward having—five different kinds of money in our pocket that we can use as God directs.

David Jeremiah, Signs of Life, p. 176