Pardon My Realness

I'm going to break the mold here and do an actual post about my life that is straight up and not cryptic.

Yes, it's scary, but hey, what's life without a little danger. 

So we went to Target tonight to buy things to fill our boxes for the Operation Christmas Child thing they're doing at church. You know, where you pick a gender and age range for your child, and fill the designated shoebox with all kinds of nifty things for a kid in a third-world country that will receive your shoebox for Christmas.

This actually has some kind of meaning for me this year since I went on a mission's trip to Cambodia this summer, met a ton of adorable children in a village who looked about 5 years younger than their actual ages, picked up 3 or 4 of them at a time because they just wanted to hug me, and braided all the little girls' hair.

So as I was pushing my cart along, looking for a makeup pouch to fill with art supplies for my 10-14 year old girl, I spritzed some of Taylor Swift's Wonderstruck perfume on myself on my way down the fragrance isle just for kicks. It made me cough, and with those hacks of overpoweringly sweet mist came a realization.

It struck me how pointless our lives are as first-world Americans.

We, with our lines of customized celebrity perfume, and our fluorescent Kitchen-Aid mixers, and our weekly planners, and our sticky notes for organizing all the unimportant details of our lives, and our hair products, and blu-ray DVD players, and magazines full of people doing pointless, everyday things like wearing something red or going to get Starbucks with their significant other.

What's it all amount to, in the grand scheme of living? 

Not a whole lot is the answer.

And I'm not entirely sure where I am going with this train of thought, which is (again) rather frightening.

But thinking of all the smiling, barefoot kids in Cambodia who spend their days just wanting to go to school so they can learn and have useful things inside their heads seems a bit more worthwhile to me than the latest 32% thinner Apple product at the moment.