Volume 33

In 1980, Ty Warner left a San Francisco stuffed animal company to start his own. He soon set his products apart by filling them with plastic “beans” which gave them a unique look and feel. Calling them Beanie Babies, Warner adopted a clever strategy.

Instead of targeting the national retailers, he put the toys in small specialty stores. Even they had restrictions. No single shop could carry all the Beanie Babies or sell more than 36 of each character per month. As soon as the toys caught on, collectors considered them hard to come by so they snapped them up.

Adding to the mystique, Warner routinely “retired” characters, sometimes after they’d been on the market a long time, and sometimes soon after their introduction. Unsure how long supplies would last, collectors bought quickly. And since Warner often made changes to individual characters — changing their colour, for example — diehard collectors often bought several versions of the same animal.

Soon, buyers were lining up for hours before stores opened and some even pursued delivery trucks suspected of carrying Beanie Babies. In West Virginia, security guard Harry Simmons fatally shot his business partner during an argument over their collection.

At the height of the craze, McDonald’s put a “Teenie Beanie Baby” in each Happy Meal. Avid collectors jammed the restaurants, buying Happy Meals, tossing the food and getting back in line. In ten days, McDonald’s gave out 100 million — one for each child in America.

But by mid-1997, fans despaired of collecting the whole set and sales slumped. So the company announced it was retiring all theBeanie Babies on December 31st, after the introduction of a black bear named “The End.” Sales surged once again. Then, on Christmas Eve, Warner supposedly relented, saying people could pay 50 cents and vote on whether the Beanie Babies should be saved. To nobody’s surprise, the phoney retirement was called off and there was yet another sales rush. But the fad was finally finished. Beanie Babies are still made but collectors who once thought they’d make a killing are dumping their sets on the Internet for next to nothing. As for Ty Warner, he made $6 million while the craze lasted.

In many ways, this sorry saga is symptomatic of today’s materialism. The truth is, happiness and security can be found all around us — in faith, love, service to others and our divine reason for living. But our culture has convinced most people that true satisfaction is found in collecting toys, everything from cars and cottages to the latest in consumer electronics. Rather than encourage us to enjoy what we do have, marketers condition us to think we’ll never really be happy until we have the whole collection.

In the search for fulfilment, we must act now, while supplies last. Better be the earliest to get the latest, because things are always changing. Why settle for a basic cell phone when colours, design and features keep evolving. Cars and clothes are the same. Even with the coolest stuff, that’s the con in contemporary: everything’s temporary.

Yet, in our compulsion to have it all, we often pay a ridiculous price, not just in money but in terms of stress, inner peace and family sacrifice. We pay with our time and, sometimes, integrity. Though many of us console ourselves with the notion that we’ll make up for it later, the pay off never comes.

“True religion with contentment is great wealth,”the Bible says. “So if we have enough food and clothing, let’s be content... Tell [those who have money] their trust should be in the living God, who richly gives us all we need for our enjoyment. Tell them to use their money to do good... and give generously to those in need... so they may take hold of real life.” (1 Tim. 6:6-8, 17-19)

One day, all our toys will be “retired” — for real, and for good. Until then, happiness can’t be found in things. Anybody who tells you differently doesn’t know beans about life.

By Rick Gamble. Published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the followers of Christ congregation in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications. To subscribe to this free weekly article, send a note to Rick at rgamble@bfree.on.ca

This week, I was blessed by a thought-provoking article written by a good friend of mine, Henry Schlarb of Ottawa, Ontario. With his permission, I’m sending this along. Enjoy.

In 1961, Lorenz was unique among meteorologists; he was also a mathematician. He also was one of the few people at the time that actually had a computer in his office, using it to write programs that would, he hoped, one day help predict the weather as accurately as one plus one equals two. During the course of preparing for one of his computer “runs” he decided to take a shortcut and use some data from the middle of a previous run to retrace the remainder of the run.

The output that he got back from the computer at the end of the run was nothing like he expected it to be. These were the same numbers that were generated as part of the whole program, yet the results were so different when they were used to begin the program. In trying to find the cause of these differing results, he found that he had made an error in one digit in one of the initial pieces of data.

And then a thought entered his mind. If these wildly differing results could come as the result of a single digit being out of place, would it ever be possible to accurately predict the weather? The title of the paper he delivered in 1972 summarized it quite nicely: Predictability: Does The Flap Of A Butterfly's Wings In Brazil Set Off A Tornado In Texas? The science of Chaos Theory was born. In a nutshell, Chaos Theory states that very small changes in the initial conditions of anything can lead to results that are out of proportion to the initial act.

Shakespeare’s Richard the Third cries out “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Imagine losing a whole nation for the lack of a horse!

How many times have we said to ourselves “If only I done something, this would or would not have happened?” And the difference between doing something and not doing it may only be a matter of seconds.

Jesus observed that the widow who gave the smallest amount of money out of her poverty gave more than any of the richer people that preceded her. The riches she gave were only possible because she decided to do it. It is the action that is important.

We’re so busy looking for the inside news on the latest celebrity. We live in a world where we are drenched with marketing slogans that want to catch our attention so that we can act under their direction. Yet it is the simplest act on our part, the cup of water in the name of Jesus that has an effect far out of proportion to the act itself.