A resolution came out years ago from the Lausanne conference of evangelicals which all of us would be wise to heed. The resolution went like this: "We humbly commit ourselves to develop a just and simple lifestyle, and to support one another in it."

A just and simple lifestyle . . . Most of us have too much stuff, and like the rich landowner in Jesus' parable, we have to build bigger houses and bigger garages just to hold our stuff. Some of us even have so much that we rent mini-warehouses to hold it all. Does it make us happy? No. We've simply become addicted to acquiring.

Randy Alcorn in his book The Treasure Principle describes our problem like this: "It's a matter of basic physics. The greater the mass, the greater the hold that mass exerts. The more things we own the greater their total mass, the more they grip us, setting us in orbit around them. Finally, like a black hole, they suck us in . . . Every item we buy is one more thing to think about, talk about, clean, repair, rearrange, fret over, and replace when it goes bad." God is calling many of us to a simpler way of living. That's where we should begin. Many of us already have too much stuff.