TARGET RUNS AND ESCAPE ROUTES
Between “treat yourself” culture and retail therapy, Christians today face a subtle challenge: learning to live gratefully and with restraint in a world that constantly tells us to consume more.
It starts innocently enough: a quick Target run with friends after class. You tell yourself you only need toothpaste, but an hour later your arms are full of clothes you didn’t plan to buy, a throw pillow that matches your dorm, maybe a new water bottle just because it’s on sale.
Everyone laughs, calling it “retail therapy,” but after a while, the joke wears thin. “Wanna run to Target?” becomes less about errands and more about indulgent escape. Across campus, these moments are familiar. Students joke about weekly Amazon packages, midnight boba runs, or impulse spending framed as a deserved reward.
On a campus not only lacking in square footage but also in varied options for entertainment, food, and hangout spots, life here can feel restrictive and monotonous. This leaves students often seeking release in small moments of freedom: Target runs, late-night food trips, or weekend shopping sprees.
These outings, though not inherently wrong, reveal a deeper cultural pattern: a quiet dependence on consumption to feel alive, autonomous, and comforted. Such a reality forces us to reckon with the spiritual implications of this lifestyle and how it shapes the very faith and values we claim to uphold.
SCROLL, SPEND, REPEAT
On a campus like Biola’s, almost all necessities are readily provided for and accessible. Meals are served daily, housing is secure, community is thriving, and coffee is readily available. By every measure our daily needs are met, and yet, discontentment still lingers.
We scroll through TikTok and Instagram and see a different world: one overflowing with options, aesthetics, and endless novelty. In comparison, dorm life can feel contained, predictable, and repetitive, especially for students who lack off-campus transportation There’s no mall to wander, no cafe strip to browse, no nightlife to chase. So when a Target run or boba trip becomes the highlight of the week, it’s not just about buying, it’s about breaking monotony, about tasting a version of freedom that feels scarce within the campus gates.
When satisfaction is found in consumption, rather than communion, we use material goods as escape routes from the limits of our own environment. Each swipe of the card or click of “add to cart” offers the illusion of control, a small rebellion against limitation.
Yet the end of this chase is never enough. Our souls, made for eternity, cannot be satisfied by next-day delivery or spontaneous off-campus purchases.
THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF CONSUMERISM
The endless want speaks to the nature of the soul. Every purchase is a mask for an underlying spiritual ache. Our ceaseless spending acts as a bandage over a deeper wound, one that only divine communion with God can heal. For the soul was not made for rampant indulgence, but for participation in God as our primary source of fulfillment.
Consumerism acts in direct opposition to such participation, instead teaching that fulfillment and control can be regained through material possessions. Yet every attempt to purchase freedom through material abundance leads us further from the only true freedom we have: surrender to Christ.
Rather than looking to the next advertised product to fulfill our need for something more, we are called to embody Scripture’s call to delight in God as the only fulfillment of our longings. When such contentment is embodied, a spirit of gratitude is able to be fostered amongst a sea of fleshly desires. For that is the basis of piety: to recognize that the Lord suffices.
In a world that equates values with accumulation, the Church bears witness to a different gospel, one of gratitude, simplicity, and stewardship. Christ does not call us to reject material goods, but to reorder our desires so that even in our consumption, He remains our treasure.
FROM CONSUMPTION TO STEWARDSHIP
Scripture’s vision for creation is not the ascetic rejection of material things, but the recognition of creation as something sacred under our stewardship. In viewing creation as such, we affirm its goodness without bowing to its allure.
Scripture calls us to something radically countercultural: the belief that enough is not a limitation but a gift. The Apostle Paul writes, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances… I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:11-13). Paul’s contentment did not come from control of abundance, but from the conviction that every circumstance, every season of plenty or lack, was held in the hands of God. Scripture’s vision for creation is not ascetic rejection of material things, but the rejection of the dependency on material things to fill our longing for Christ.
Perhaps Biola’s simplicity can be received as a form of spiritual disciple, rather than a deprivation. To live on a campus where options are limited is an opportunity to practice gratitude with boundaries. It trains us to resist the false gospel of endless choice, to discover joy not in what can be bought, but in what has already been given.
Imagine if Target runs became less about escape and more about fellowship, a place where gratitude, not indulgence, defined our outings. What would it mean for Biola to model a culture of contentment?
CREATION AS GIFT
The material world is a gift– God’s gift to man. It is not a product to be exploited for the sake of a fleeting sense of autonomy. It is not a means by which we can suppress and indulge. Nor is it the source to which we are to run when loneliness, discontentment, and dissatisfaction sets in.
We, as students committed to walking in the way of the Lord, are called to consume rightly – gratefully, moderately, purposefully – and in doing so, to affirm God’s creation as gift.
Such a view of creation encapsulates God’s vision for mankind: to take hold of the abundance around us with hearts of gratitude and duty, and to live freely within God’s boundaries. In doing so, we cultivate lives of truth, goodness, and beauty, in which creation is stewarded for the purpose of bringing God glory.
The answer to our constant search for satisfaction and fulfillment lies in Christ alone, for in Him lies fullness of joy. Psalm 34 calls the Christian to “Taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. O fear the Lord, ye his saints: for there is no want to them that fear him. The young lions do lack and suffer hunger: but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.”
So let us embody this Psalm, cultivating Godly contentment, an eternal perspective, and a proper ordering of desires as we aim to lead lives that glorify God within the material world.
Perhaps the next time we hear, “Wanna run to Target,” we pause before answering, not letting dissatisfaction and desire rule us, but instead allowing discernment and gratitude to recognize that the end of all our longing is already ours, that we have been bountifully provided for by a God who has blessed us greatly. For those that seek Him lack no good thing.
