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Just a few days ago, as pictures were once again flashing across my television screen of the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Pakistan, my eyes alighted on a leaflet which had fallen through my letterbox and which I had put on one side. On the front there is a picture of a young long-haired blond model, head back, clad in a fir-collared jacket and silk skirt. 'Change your image,' the caption reads. 'For the important things of life: the centre MK.'

Publicity of this nature can be seductive, and, to one degree or another, we can all be taken in by it. We are easily enticed by the idea that in order to change our lives all we need do is buy a new set of clothes or trade the old car in for another. The consumer mentality  purports to be an easy solution to our problems: it demands no self-scrutiny, no confrontation of the fundamental realities of our lives it simply demands that we shell out more cash.

But because it is essentially a superficial solution, we remain only superficially affected by it, even if the debts of money we owe can become  anything but superficial.  If all we seek to do is change our image, at core we shall be left ultimately dissatisfied and unchanged. There was an elderly man I used to visit. Now in his eighties, he had worked all his life down the mines and was suffering from a terminal lung disease which left him constantly breathless. He lived in a simple cottage with just a few sticks of old furniture around him. 'Every morning when I wake up,' he would say to me; 'I give thanks to God for the new day. And I come downstairs and make a cup of tea and sit in my chair, and I give thanks to God for my nice warm fire.' Such God-given contentment always both inspired and shamed me. I had no doubt that he could teach me something of what ‘the important things of life' really are.

The  Gospel challenges us to look at the messages around us with Christian eyes.  We proclaim that  the centre of our life is not a shopping mall, but Jesus Christ; that what brings glory to God is not a stockpile of glittering new things, but human beings fully alive; that renewal is not a commodity to be  purchased, but a grace freely offered to us in Christ. God sees through  our appearances - no matter how beautiful they may be - to the realities beneath, and longs to meet us in the deepest and even darkest corners of our hearts. It is there that God's transformation of us truly begins.

Mary Cotes is Ecumenical Moderator, Milton Keynes

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