Fall has arrived!  “Pumpkin Spice” can be found everywhere — in your latte, muffins, candles, air fresheners and even in peanut butter! People are starting to decorate. And churches, including ours, are planning fall festivals and trunk-or-treats!   

When our daughter was younger, we used to take her to HarvestFest at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.  One of the attractions there was the hay-bale maze.  Isabella would go through the maze and try to navigate her way to the exit.  We watched with excitement as she and her friends would go through the maze over and again.  As she got older, we found venues with a cornfield maze and the fun continued! 

Keep the concept of a hay-bale maze or cornfield maze in mind, but think of retail stores like Home Goods, Best Buy, T.J. Maxx, Five Below, and Target (to name a few).  Have you noticed that you have to walk through a “maze” in order to make your purchase?  The maze, however, is neither hay bales nor cornstalks.  Rather, these mazes are filled with cell-phone cases, phone chargers, cosmetics, movie-sized boxes of candy, flavored coffee, blue-tooth speakers, gift cards and breath mints.  Products are positioned in what are called “point of purchase” (POP) displays.  The store hopes that while we wait on the next register, that we will fill a basket with these seemingly inexpensive impulse purchases which generate large profits for the retailer.  It can be hard to resist those pumpkin-spice tea cookies or that gnome garden figurine! 

Last weekend while visiting Isabella for family weekend at college, we went shopping.  We walked through the “maze” of POP products and resisted the temptation to buy stuff we didn’t need.  But what happened next will always stay with me.  When we completed the transaction with our debit card, the pin-pad displayed the amount of the sale along with the word, “captured.”  In other words, “$41.01 Captured” appeared on the screen.  What an interesting way to communicate that the store got our money . . . they captured it!  I understand that this means to capture a customer’s interest in a product through making a sale, but I had never seen it displayed so blatantly!  This is something to think about when we are spending our hard-earned money.  We want to spend it wisely, avoiding impulse purchases and revolving debt so that, with God’s help, we control our money rather than our money or retailers controlling us.   

Perhaps the only thing we that do want captured is our hearts, by none other than the Lord Jesus himself, who said,  “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21, NIV)  George Matheson echoes this in his hymn, Make Me a Captive, Lord, writing, “Make me a captive, Lord, And then I shall be free.” 

In Christ’s care and love,