Prodigal Miser

I have a dirty little secret.

But if I share this with you, you have to promise me that you'll keep it on the hush-hush.

Ready?

I use a lot of printer paper at work, and none of it for my actual job.

For example, I eat lunch every day at around 2 p.m. At around 1:50 p.m. I begin perusing some of my favorite Web sites for interesting articles that I can print out so that I can read them during my lunch break. I have been doing this since my first week at work, which was over a year and a half ago. During the NBA season, most of the articles I print will be basketball-related, but during the offseason I'll print maybe one or two basketball articles, then print out a couple more articles originating from various news sites. On average, I print out approximately 8-10 pages of content every afternoon.

This past week, I had to print out 100 copies of something that was not work-related. I printed 50 pages at one printer, and 50 at another. One of the printers kept on getting jammed, so every sixth or seventh sheet would get crumpled up in the printer and would have to be thrown out. Alas, it took about 10 minutes to print out all 100 pages. A tragedy, I know.

I began thinking about my liberal use of company paper (in addition to various other company resources, including napkins, plastic utensils, drinks, and toilet paper [this last one could be another entry by itself] among others) and realized that the reason why it is so easy for me to print things out is because I do not pay for the printer paper. In fact, I do not pay for a single thing I use at work.

Would I ever print out 100 pages of anything at home? No! And why is that? Yes, because I'm cheap, but also because...well, I'm cheap. I mean, c'mon, do you know how much printer ink costs these days? It's ridiculous.

Now, I began mulling this over on my drive home today. I don't know why exactly. I'm sure part of it stemmed from guilt, and part of it from sheer 'the-drive-home-after-work' boredom.

But I realized this: though my liberal printing habits at work is a fairly appalling offense, the idea behind it does not have to be.

The way I see it, (get ready for a trite statement) there are basically two types of people: those that think that their life is their own, and those that do not. To dig even further into the latter group of people, they can be further split into two groups: those that believe their life belongs to those around them, their fellow man, and those that believe their life belongs to a higher being.

I'm a Christian, so I will speak from that perspective.

As a Christian, I believe (among many other things) that my life belongs to God. Not in any shallow, vanilla sense either. To be more specific, I believe that my life has been ransomed, purchased, redeemed, etc. by God, and that this fact is evidenced by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So, in a very real sense, it is my firm conviction that everything in my life (my time, my energy, my words, my thoughts, my body, my resources, my personality, my pains, my joys, my passions, my strengths, my weaknesses, my likes, my dislikes, my past, my present, my future, etc.) is not my own, but God's, because in ransoming my life he has come to possess all of me. Like Paul says in Romans 6:22, I am now God's slave.

I have not paid a single cent for anything I have had, anything I have now, or anything I will have in the future, nor have I paid a single cent for anything and everything that I am (and am not) today. Nothing that I would call "mine" in human vernacular is really mine.

I have paid nothing for it; I have paid nothing for anything.

Here is the point of the entry where that incessant confabulator named Conscience begins to murmur something in my ear.

Why, then, is it so difficult for you to be liberal with it all?

Tomorrow, at around 2 p.m., I shall feel utterly penurious.