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And so, on December 19, 1973, at 11:35 p.m., when Johnny Carson walked on the live studio set of The Tonight Show and quipped, "There's an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States," it wasn't funny. The joke had a toehold in reality: Earlier in the day, Congressman Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin had warned that if the federal bureaucracy didn't catch up on its supply bids, government agencies would run out of toilet tissue within a month or two. Carson took this shard of trivia and played it for a laugh. Then, as was his trademark, he swung at an invisible golf ball, took a commercial break, and got on with the show.

Not so the nation. Twenty million viewers flew into panic. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of frantic shoppers lined up outside the supermarkets of America, poised to dash to the paper aisles and stockpile rolls, fighting over bundles of two-ply and four-ply. There were brawls in the aisles and scrums at the checkout. Some store managers tried to limit sales to four rolls per customer, but they had no way of monitoring how many times a customer came back, and most came back repeatedly. By noon on December 20—mere hours after Johnny's flippant remark—America was sold out.

Johnny Carson's offhand gag line had sparked a national run (no pun intended) on toilet tissue.

We're generally gullible about news of scarcity. We have, it seems, an inbuilt skittishness about shortfall. This has been with us a long while, since the garden, by my reckoning.

Most of us live afraid that we're almost out of time. But you and I, we're heirs of eternity. We're not short of days.

We just need to number them aright.

Mark Buchanan's latest book, from which this article is excerpted, is The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath (Word, 2005).

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Christianity Today articles on Sabbath-keeping include:

Take Back Your Sabbath | Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. A Christianity Today (Nov. 4, 2003)

CT Classic: Fallow Time | The Sabbath can protect us from the temptations of wealth. (Nov. 4, 2003)

Receiving the Day the Lord Has Made | A day of rest is God's gift to us. (March 6, 2000)

Rediscovering the Sabbath (Part 1 of 2) | The Sabbath is the most challenging—and necessary—spiritual discipline for contemporary Christians. (September 1, 1997)

Rediscovering the Sabbath, Part 2 | The Sabbath is the most challenging—and necessary—spiritual discipline for contemporary Christians. (September 1, 1997)

More articles by Mark Buchanan include:

Rabbit Trails to God | John Updike has made a career of writing the most theological novels in America. (July 3, 2003)

Dance of the God-Struck | There's something about worship that can drive even a king to strip down and leap up. (Oct. 25, 2002)

Life Is Unfair (and That's Okay) | Even when life disturbs, disfigures, or destroys, God whispers, "If you do what is right, it will go well with you." (May 5, 2001)

Jesus Wept | God's love, mercy, passion, grief, and anger are chiseled down to two words. (Mar. 6, 2001)

Benefit of the Doubt | The disciple Thomas reveals an important truth about faith. (Apr. 7, 2000)

Running with Jonah | Do we really want to be closer to God? (Nov. 3, 1999)

Stuck on the Road to Emmaus | The secret to why we are not fulfilled. (July 12, 1999)

Trapped in the Cult of the Next Thing | If ever there was a cult that gave us stones when we asked for bread, this is it. (Sept. 6, 1999)

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2