This piece of writing came out of my experiences in Zambia and was shaped by trying to answer the question posed by LEAST at Wheaton Academy this fall: How have you been changed by your relationships with the LEAST?
For me, my relationships have radically altered my life for good because of what I have received and learned and experienced in a culture and with people I never knew before...I closed LEAST this year with this piece...it is personal and a reflection of how God uses surprising folks to change us deeply in His Kingdom plan...ENJOY...
I am currently spending my days doing some writing about what God invited us to do as a student community over the last six years in response to the AIDS pandemic in Zambia…and as I retell the story in my typing of words each day, the stories invariably cause me to sneak a peek at many of the African faces I have gotten to know and love over that time frame…you see, my story of my own life and faith now is deeply intertwined with these faces and their stories…I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to teach in such a way that it changes and transforms the lives of the students sitting in my classroom, soccer pitch, youth group room, mountain top vista, or retreat cabin…I’ve desperately wanted them to hear and embrace the things that truly matter, what they really need to learn to experience all the fullness of life Jesus has died and overcome death to bring into their lives today…
And in the midst of all that teaching, I have found myself still being taught about what is most important in this life as well…several years ago there was an extremely popular book by Robert Fulghum entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten… and his list of findings included these kinds of phrases:
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Take a nap every afternoon.
This book literally sold millions of copies and I remember getting a copy for my graduation from college from one of my relatives…
But if I were to write my own book around this very topic 20 years later after receiving these pearls of wisdom, my title would be very different:
And so tonight, I want to share with you a short list of my own entitled All I ever really needed to know I learned in Zambia…and here it goes:
*Living without a watch or clock is a rather freeing way to live
*You play a game simply because you love it
*Life must be celebrated with great passion
*Share freely even if you don’t have extras when you give it away
*Dance when the Spirit of God moves inside of you
*Sing with a voice not caring what people around you think
*Learn all you can because it is a privilege to receive an education
*When friends come to visit, you run out to greet them
*The church service ought to be a highlight of one’s week
*When your family member is sick, you drop everything and do anything to care for them and their needs
*Life is fragile
*You get to know someone when you do things together that you both love to do
*Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world
*Water and food are blessings from heaven
*A short life can still be a full life
*A gracious spirit attracts other people to you
*Telling and listening to stories is one of the most enjoyable things in life to do
*You can and should laugh often every day
*A blanket makes all the difference when you lay down to sleep
*Riding a bike enables you to get places you couldn’t go before
*Where you grow up shapes a good bit of what your life will become
*Hope sustains us thru experiences we never imagined we’d encounter along the way
*It’s OK to ask God for a miracle…because He’s a God who makes the impossible become reality
In the summer of 2004 on my first visit to Zambia I took a walk with my friend Fordson who would become the kind of friend who would drive from anywhere in the whole country to share a meal with me when he found out I was coming back to his country…and on our walk we dreamed together about what God might want to do in Kakolo Village…he had dreams that were way bigger than I could imagine…dreams that truly were God sized in the midst of completely overwhelming and devastating poverty…we pointed to an overgrown field of wild grass and imagined things like electricity, a huge schoolhouse addition, a new medical clinic, clean water wells, a ministry center…and God has seen fit to allow us to help make those dreams become reality…and the last thing Fordson talked about was something rather unusual…he turned to a an overgrown field spot a couple hundred yards away with trees and said that’s where the brand new soccer pitch must go…and you can come back and play on it with us someday…
In 2007, I made a very difficult decision and stepped down as the varsity boys soccer coach at WA…to be honest, I was left wondering if I had made the right decision…I loved coaching, loved my players, and wasn’t sure I had really fulfilled the goals I set out to achieve on the field…as the summer began and the season drew near, I was missing it and feeling so weird about not being part of a program I had poured my life into…and then we went back to Zambia for our third trip…I have loved soccer for most of my life, and the people of Zambia play the game every day even without grass, round balls, and nets on goals…it is easy to feel out of place when you first encounter the LEAST, but for me and many of my friends, a soccer ball and a dirt field made us feel very much at home…and as we reconnected with our brothers and sisters in Kakolo Village that summer, there was one beautiful brand new thing the community had built without resources from WA students…by hand over the course of many months the Kakolo community had built a gorgeous new soccer pitch, with a level dirt playing field, white pipe goals with nets, and skybox seats built on the top of 2 gigantic anthills overlooking the pitch…it was truly the most beautiful field I had seen in all of our travels throughout the nation…and it was a gift for us, a place where we could play the game together on a field built with love for people who played on perfect grass on the other side of the world…and on the side of the field was a rather large marker that had my name on it as the person who this field was dedicated to…it was a complete surprise and arguably the best gift I have ever received in my entire life…it was the completion of my dream, fordson’s dream, and god’s dream for this community and our relationship as two communities were brought together…as I stepped onto that field to play, I felt remarkably loved and affirmed…and much of the pain in leaving coaching melted away because of the reality that I would always have my field to play and coach on…because of my friends on the other side of the world who knew what I loved and whom I loved…and if you ask me what some of the best moments and days in my life have been and will continue to be, I would tell you about playing soccer with those called the Least and my students who I love dearly…for on that soccer pitch people in Chicago will never ever see I am at my second home, playing the game I love with people who have shown me the love of Jesus in a most personal and tangible and sacrificial way…and I am forever changed for the good, my life is obviously different in its richness and meaning, because of the faith, hope and love of the people of Zambia…may we continue to serve and be served, to love and be loved, to help build and create and dream dreams, to allow Jesus to be present in our lives through the relationships with those He cares most deeply about, those that Jesus called the LEAST…AMEN
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Why I Am Hopeful by Andy Crouch
Here's a fantastic piece on the current economic crisis from Andy Crouch, one of my favorite thinkers/writers, and the author of a brilliant book called Culture Making we are using as a key text in my Senior level Bible classes at Wheaton Academy...Andy always causes me to think at a deep level and see more than what might be apparent at first glance in the things that happen in our world...
It won't be easy for us—and that's good.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett reiterated his best-known investing principle in the New York Times last Thursday: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." It's a vivid way of saying that the best investors are, to borrow a phrase from macroeconomics, counter-cyclical. Their investing sentiments are set by simply observing the prevailing mood in the marketplace, and doing the opposite.
Something like this maxim applies to the work of any Christian who wants to discern the times and speak truthfully about our culture. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said he wanted his preaching to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable"—strangely akin to Buffett's guideline. The whole record of the Hebrew prophets is counter-cyclical, seen most vividly in the transition from Isaiah 1–39 to Isaiah 40–66. The first half of the canonical book contains searing denunciations of a complacent, compromised people at the height of their comfort. The second half, its sights trained on a decimated population in exile, begins, "Comfort my people." And Isaiah has his own version of Buffett-style counter-cyclicality: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low."
Well, our culture is pretty afflicted right now. Which is why I am more hopeful than I've been in a long time.
I am not hopeful because I envision an easy way out of the current economic mess. We are entering into the Great Deleveraging, where an entire country of consumers will have to pare back their reliance on cheap mortgages and abundant credit cards. (Remember when your mailbox was stuffed with credit card offers? Seen any lately?) The national savings rate might even rise above 0%—yes, that is zero percent, the proportion Americans have been collectively saving for several years now. But that means that consumption, a major engine of our economy, will have to decline dramatically.
I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote for neither. (Not for the first time—in 2004 I wrote in Colin Powell.)
I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world—and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India—and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.
I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.
I want to differentiate this hope from a kind of declinism among some of my "progressive" Christian friends, who frankly seem to salivate over the prospect that our capitalist culture may be teetering on the brink of collapse. I don't share their sense of satisfaction, and I don't share their analysis. At the analytical level, I believe liberal democracy and free markets are resilient and beneficial systems of human governance (granted that they are also, as Churchill said, the least bad of the alternatives). They have powerful self-correcting capacities. There is a reason that the American stock market has fallen the least of all the major world exchanges in the past few weeks. We have an impressively transparent economic system that, while certainly not preventing corruption and greed, does reveal it and punish it sooner than any comparable system, and frequently, though not always, rewards effort and innovation more effectively. Our political system is less robust, to be kind, but outside the depressing morass of electoral politics there are public servants of incredible intelligence and character—among whom I would certainly include Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Sheila Bair, along with many of the prospective leaders in an Obama administration. Precisely at times of crisis, as we've seen, the idiocy of politics can still be overcome by credible leadership from civil servants like these. I am deeply proud to live in a country where someone as fantastically wealthy as Paulson spends his days, nights, and weekends doing the largely thankless task of public service. Our markets and our system of government, for all their flaws, are an amazing renewable resource handed on to us by our forebears.
And this is why I can't share the sense of satisfaction I sense in some of my "prophetic" friends. I believe the first step in culture making is not creating (let alone condemning, critiquing, or consuming) but cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. American Christians, on the right and the left, have been painfully bad at cultivating. We want to jump to "transformation" and "impact" (words generally used on the right) or to "resistance" and "revolution" (favored words of the left). We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners: people whose first cultural calling is to keep good what is, by the common grace of God, already good. A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds; she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden, and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds. This kind of love of the garden—loving our broken, beautiful cultures for what they are at their best—is the precondition, I am coming to believe, for any serious cultural creativity or influence. When weeds infest the garden, the gardener does not take the opportunity to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole. She gets patiently, discerningly, to work keeping the garden good.
So why am I hopeful? Because I believe the coming years are going to reveal some pernicious weeds in our culture for what they are. One of the characteristics of weeds is that they suck up resources from other plants. They are quick-growing, quick-spreading, invasive. They do not coexist with the other plants in the garden, they overtake them. Kudzu is a weed not because it is unattractive in its own way or even has no rightful place in the ecosystem, but because it grows over and chokes out other valuable and beautiful things. Weeds are, as every gardener knows, the easiest thing to grow.
And I believe the fundamental weed in the American garden is, in fact, ease. Easy-ness. Effortlessness. Along with the incredible benefits of the rise of technology has been this terrible weed: the idea that things should be easy. The Staples office-supply chain has profited handsomely selling the ultimate symbol of our times: a plastic button that does absolutely nothing but is great fun to push, labeled "easy."
The quest for technological ease has invaded and distorted not just, metaphorically, our culture, but also, literally, our agriculture. When we start to treat cattle as meat-producing devices, it makes sense to corral them in feedlots, where they start to make one another very sick. No problem—we will dose them with huge amounts of antibiotics. Antibiotics are a fantastically useful button to push when your child is sick. But when they are used as all-purpose coveralls for situations driven by fundamentally flawed assumptions—that cattle should be efficient devices, not creatures worthy of respect and patient care; that children with the slightest discomfort should have every possible button pushed on their behalf, even when (as with almost all ear infections) the button will do nothing—they turn on their users. It is very possible that our great-grandchildren will look back with nostalgia on the 20th century as the Antibiotic Century. Singular. I am hopeful that medicine will deliver a new way to ward off the worst that bacteria can do—but it is very likely that fighting bacteria will never again in human history be as easy as it was forty years ago. We have pushed the antibiotic button so hard, so often, that it may very soon cease to work altogether.
Examples could be multiplied. I spent a few days last week in Gwinnett County, Georgia, which for the past twenty years has been one of the fastest-growing counties in America. I was struck by the amazing, beautiful collector roads—Sugarloaf Parkway, Satellite Boulevard—their median strips, wide lanes, and turning radiuses tuned and trimmed to the needs of a huge volume of fast-moving vehicles. There is no better place in the world to be a car, especially a somewhat oversized, top-heavy sport utility vehicle, than the recently developed portions of Gwinnett County. If you are an SUV, it was designed for you: no curves too sharp, no lanes too narrow, no hills too steep. If there weren't so many other people flooding the roads, it would be a place of perfect driving ease.
At the same time, those roads are a very unpleasant place to be a human being doing what human beings do so beautifully most places in the world: walking. Walking is simply not an option. Nor are there any other viable options—no trains, few buses, and no accommodation for bicycles. The beautiful ease of a car is the only choice. As long as you have a car, of course, that's perfectly fine.
This is in stark contrast to the part of the world where I live, an early 20th-century suburb designed before single-purpose ease became the de facto principle of urban planning. In my town, it is certainly possible to drive, but it is not exactly easy. The streets are narrow, forcing drivers to slow down and occasionally wait for other cars to pass. But this is actually a good thing, because cars are not the only mode of transportation. An eleven-year-old can happily and safely ride a bike almost anywhere in town (the two major through streets are a bit too busy for this parent's comfort, though I ride on them myself all the time). There are sidewalks everywhere. The train that runs directly through our town to Philadelphia gets you downtown faster than a car at almost any time of day. I am sure that most journeys that begin in my town are still taken by car, but bicycle, foot, and train are all options, and often good ones. None of these options are perfectly easy—cars have to wait for the train at grade crossings, pedestrians have to watch out for eleven-year-old bicyclists—but the reduction in single-purpose ease is more than made up for by the abundance of choice, and the human scale of the choices available.
I couldn't help asking myself: where would I rather live if gasoline cost $8 per gallon? Or, perhaps a more immediate and realistic question as the oil bubble deflates along with the whole economy, where would I rather lose my job, and with it the ability to pay for insurance and endless gas? Where would a person with suddenly limited economic resources have a richer, fuller human life? The answer, of course, is not Gwinnett County. A paradise for big vehicles and capacious houses is only a paradise as long as you have money. My town, cramped streets and all, is where you want to be when the bubble bursts.
So, to wrap up this way-too-long-for-Web-attention-spans essay, here is the good news in our very real and sobering predicament: Easy is not going to be easy any longer. Our culture's addiction to ease is unsustainable. A core Christian conviction—one that informed much of the best of Western civilization—is that the good life is not easy. It requires discipline. It invites us into pain. It makes of us ascetics—not people who shun all earthly joys, but people who choose to limit our appetite for ease so that we might actually know true joy.
If we are not dualists, we will see that what is true for souls is true for societies as well—because both souls and societies are subjects of God's creative intent. No society can build itself on ease. Most everything that is good about our society was forged by people who took discipline and work seriously, who built their lives around risk and enjoyed their leisure precisely because it was the fruit of discipline, the Sabbath after a week of concerted work. Most everything that is worst about our society—not least the very worst thing about America, the ongoing legacy of the Atlantic slave trade—was the product of an idolatrous desire to exploit human beings and the created world, extracting labor and resources with no regard for discipline, dignity, and God-given limits.
Our attention spans are indeed very short in America, but the evaporation of wealth in recent weeks has caused us to dimly recall the spectre of the Great Depression. Less often noted is that the Great Depression was preceded by a previous era of ease and abundance. The fruit of the (seeming) abundance of the Roaring Twenties was an economic crisis of shattering proportions.
But the irony is that the fruit of the Great Depression was not only dramatically improved systems of economic governance and ultimately even greater prosperity, but people of a fundamentally different character. They suffered tremendous hardship and lived for the rest of their lives with astonishing thrift, even as the post-war economic expansion delivered them real wealth. (The terrible experience of combat in World War II had a similar effect on many of their children.) A friend recently told me that the highest average household net worth in his Midwestern city is found in neighborhoods filled with modest, $100,000-dollar homes. Most of the inhabitants are older. They have lived below their means, with discipline and integrity, their whole lives. Many of them, I suspect, are very much like my grandmother Ann Bennett, "Mimama" to us grandchildren, who died several years ago leaving not just substantial savings for her children, but a heritage of living abundantly within the constraints of a life that was never especially easy. If they are anything like Mimama, they will tell you that life has not been easy, but it has been good. Very, very good.
And this is why I am hopeful in the face of both the greed and the fear of the present moment: After the Great Deleveraging is past, with any luck and by God's grace, a lot more of us will be more like them.
It won't be easy for us—and that's good.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett reiterated his best-known investing principle in the New York Times last Thursday: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." It's a vivid way of saying that the best investors are, to borrow a phrase from macroeconomics, counter-cyclical. Their investing sentiments are set by simply observing the prevailing mood in the marketplace, and doing the opposite.
Something like this maxim applies to the work of any Christian who wants to discern the times and speak truthfully about our culture. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said he wanted his preaching to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable"—strangely akin to Buffett's guideline. The whole record of the Hebrew prophets is counter-cyclical, seen most vividly in the transition from Isaiah 1–39 to Isaiah 40–66. The first half of the canonical book contains searing denunciations of a complacent, compromised people at the height of their comfort. The second half, its sights trained on a decimated population in exile, begins, "Comfort my people." And Isaiah has his own version of Buffett-style counter-cyclicality: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low."
Well, our culture is pretty afflicted right now. Which is why I am more hopeful than I've been in a long time.
I am not hopeful because I envision an easy way out of the current economic mess. We are entering into the Great Deleveraging, where an entire country of consumers will have to pare back their reliance on cheap mortgages and abundant credit cards. (Remember when your mailbox was stuffed with credit card offers? Seen any lately?) The national savings rate might even rise above 0%—yes, that is zero percent, the proportion Americans have been collectively saving for several years now. But that means that consumption, a major engine of our economy, will have to decline dramatically.
I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote for neither. (Not for the first time—in 2004 I wrote in Colin Powell.)
I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world—and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India—and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.
I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.
I want to differentiate this hope from a kind of declinism among some of my "progressive" Christian friends, who frankly seem to salivate over the prospect that our capitalist culture may be teetering on the brink of collapse. I don't share their sense of satisfaction, and I don't share their analysis. At the analytical level, I believe liberal democracy and free markets are resilient and beneficial systems of human governance (granted that they are also, as Churchill said, the least bad of the alternatives). They have powerful self-correcting capacities. There is a reason that the American stock market has fallen the least of all the major world exchanges in the past few weeks. We have an impressively transparent economic system that, while certainly not preventing corruption and greed, does reveal it and punish it sooner than any comparable system, and frequently, though not always, rewards effort and innovation more effectively. Our political system is less robust, to be kind, but outside the depressing morass of electoral politics there are public servants of incredible intelligence and character—among whom I would certainly include Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Sheila Bair, along with many of the prospective leaders in an Obama administration. Precisely at times of crisis, as we've seen, the idiocy of politics can still be overcome by credible leadership from civil servants like these. I am deeply proud to live in a country where someone as fantastically wealthy as Paulson spends his days, nights, and weekends doing the largely thankless task of public service. Our markets and our system of government, for all their flaws, are an amazing renewable resource handed on to us by our forebears.
And this is why I can't share the sense of satisfaction I sense in some of my "prophetic" friends. I believe the first step in culture making is not creating (let alone condemning, critiquing, or consuming) but cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. American Christians, on the right and the left, have been painfully bad at cultivating. We want to jump to "transformation" and "impact" (words generally used on the right) or to "resistance" and "revolution" (favored words of the left). We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners: people whose first cultural calling is to keep good what is, by the common grace of God, already good. A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds; she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden, and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds. This kind of love of the garden—loving our broken, beautiful cultures for what they are at their best—is the precondition, I am coming to believe, for any serious cultural creativity or influence. When weeds infest the garden, the gardener does not take the opportunity to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole. She gets patiently, discerningly, to work keeping the garden good.
So why am I hopeful? Because I believe the coming years are going to reveal some pernicious weeds in our culture for what they are. One of the characteristics of weeds is that they suck up resources from other plants. They are quick-growing, quick-spreading, invasive. They do not coexist with the other plants in the garden, they overtake them. Kudzu is a weed not because it is unattractive in its own way or even has no rightful place in the ecosystem, but because it grows over and chokes out other valuable and beautiful things. Weeds are, as every gardener knows, the easiest thing to grow.
And I believe the fundamental weed in the American garden is, in fact, ease. Easy-ness. Effortlessness. Along with the incredible benefits of the rise of technology has been this terrible weed: the idea that things should be easy. The Staples office-supply chain has profited handsomely selling the ultimate symbol of our times: a plastic button that does absolutely nothing but is great fun to push, labeled "easy."
The quest for technological ease has invaded and distorted not just, metaphorically, our culture, but also, literally, our agriculture. When we start to treat cattle as meat-producing devices, it makes sense to corral them in feedlots, where they start to make one another very sick. No problem—we will dose them with huge amounts of antibiotics. Antibiotics are a fantastically useful button to push when your child is sick. But when they are used as all-purpose coveralls for situations driven by fundamentally flawed assumptions—that cattle should be efficient devices, not creatures worthy of respect and patient care; that children with the slightest discomfort should have every possible button pushed on their behalf, even when (as with almost all ear infections) the button will do nothing—they turn on their users. It is very possible that our great-grandchildren will look back with nostalgia on the 20th century as the Antibiotic Century. Singular. I am hopeful that medicine will deliver a new way to ward off the worst that bacteria can do—but it is very likely that fighting bacteria will never again in human history be as easy as it was forty years ago. We have pushed the antibiotic button so hard, so often, that it may very soon cease to work altogether.
Examples could be multiplied. I spent a few days last week in Gwinnett County, Georgia, which for the past twenty years has been one of the fastest-growing counties in America. I was struck by the amazing, beautiful collector roads—Sugarloaf Parkway, Satellite Boulevard—their median strips, wide lanes, and turning radiuses tuned and trimmed to the needs of a huge volume of fast-moving vehicles. There is no better place in the world to be a car, especially a somewhat oversized, top-heavy sport utility vehicle, than the recently developed portions of Gwinnett County. If you are an SUV, it was designed for you: no curves too sharp, no lanes too narrow, no hills too steep. If there weren't so many other people flooding the roads, it would be a place of perfect driving ease.
At the same time, those roads are a very unpleasant place to be a human being doing what human beings do so beautifully most places in the world: walking. Walking is simply not an option. Nor are there any other viable options—no trains, few buses, and no accommodation for bicycles. The beautiful ease of a car is the only choice. As long as you have a car, of course, that's perfectly fine.
This is in stark contrast to the part of the world where I live, an early 20th-century suburb designed before single-purpose ease became the de facto principle of urban planning. In my town, it is certainly possible to drive, but it is not exactly easy. The streets are narrow, forcing drivers to slow down and occasionally wait for other cars to pass. But this is actually a good thing, because cars are not the only mode of transportation. An eleven-year-old can happily and safely ride a bike almost anywhere in town (the two major through streets are a bit too busy for this parent's comfort, though I ride on them myself all the time). There are sidewalks everywhere. The train that runs directly through our town to Philadelphia gets you downtown faster than a car at almost any time of day. I am sure that most journeys that begin in my town are still taken by car, but bicycle, foot, and train are all options, and often good ones. None of these options are perfectly easy—cars have to wait for the train at grade crossings, pedestrians have to watch out for eleven-year-old bicyclists—but the reduction in single-purpose ease is more than made up for by the abundance of choice, and the human scale of the choices available.
I couldn't help asking myself: where would I rather live if gasoline cost $8 per gallon? Or, perhaps a more immediate and realistic question as the oil bubble deflates along with the whole economy, where would I rather lose my job, and with it the ability to pay for insurance and endless gas? Where would a person with suddenly limited economic resources have a richer, fuller human life? The answer, of course, is not Gwinnett County. A paradise for big vehicles and capacious houses is only a paradise as long as you have money. My town, cramped streets and all, is where you want to be when the bubble bursts.
So, to wrap up this way-too-long-for-Web-attention-spans essay, here is the good news in our very real and sobering predicament: Easy is not going to be easy any longer. Our culture's addiction to ease is unsustainable. A core Christian conviction—one that informed much of the best of Western civilization—is that the good life is not easy. It requires discipline. It invites us into pain. It makes of us ascetics—not people who shun all earthly joys, but people who choose to limit our appetite for ease so that we might actually know true joy.
If we are not dualists, we will see that what is true for souls is true for societies as well—because both souls and societies are subjects of God's creative intent. No society can build itself on ease. Most everything that is good about our society was forged by people who took discipline and work seriously, who built their lives around risk and enjoyed their leisure precisely because it was the fruit of discipline, the Sabbath after a week of concerted work. Most everything that is worst about our society—not least the very worst thing about America, the ongoing legacy of the Atlantic slave trade—was the product of an idolatrous desire to exploit human beings and the created world, extracting labor and resources with no regard for discipline, dignity, and God-given limits.
Our attention spans are indeed very short in America, but the evaporation of wealth in recent weeks has caused us to dimly recall the spectre of the Great Depression. Less often noted is that the Great Depression was preceded by a previous era of ease and abundance. The fruit of the (seeming) abundance of the Roaring Twenties was an economic crisis of shattering proportions.
But the irony is that the fruit of the Great Depression was not only dramatically improved systems of economic governance and ultimately even greater prosperity, but people of a fundamentally different character. They suffered tremendous hardship and lived for the rest of their lives with astonishing thrift, even as the post-war economic expansion delivered them real wealth. (The terrible experience of combat in World War II had a similar effect on many of their children.) A friend recently told me that the highest average household net worth in his Midwestern city is found in neighborhoods filled with modest, $100,000-dollar homes. Most of the inhabitants are older. They have lived below their means, with discipline and integrity, their whole lives. Many of them, I suspect, are very much like my grandmother Ann Bennett, "Mimama" to us grandchildren, who died several years ago leaving not just substantial savings for her children, but a heritage of living abundantly within the constraints of a life that was never especially easy. If they are anything like Mimama, they will tell you that life has not been easy, but it has been good. Very, very good.
And this is why I am hopeful in the face of both the greed and the fear of the present moment: After the Great Deleveraging is past, with any luck and by God's grace, a lot more of us will be more like them.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Simplicity of Justice by Jeff Goins from NEUE
I love this story illustrating from Scripture what it means to live out justice in our everyday lives...turning right vs left is so true for the very city I live in and for so many of us who live in isolation despite being so near needs and people right around the corner who we can choose to turn towards or away from...may we have the courage to look and see and go right...
I turned right instead of left. That’s all I did, and it made all the difference. I don’t know why I did it exactly. My wife had sent me out to pick up some groceries, and it was habit to turn the steering wheel left when pulling out of our apartment complex. Yet, something inside compelled me to go right, driving past the lower income housing in Southeast Nashville, where every sign quickly goes from English to Spanish to Arabic.
Although Nashville isn’t New York, it’s still a formidable city, and the largest one I have ever lived in for more than a year. When I moved here from the Midwest, it was culture shock on a lot of levels: sweet tea, deep drawls, cowboy boots, belt buckles, Christian music, SUVs, guys with haircuts styled after Jan Brady, and visible poverty. With the exception of the one guy who lived in the local park, I never really saw a lot of poor people when I was growing up or attending college. So, when I moved here, I didn’t really know what to do. These people that approached me on the streets asking for money frightened me. Did I give out of fear, point them to the nearest shelter, or just blow them off like everyone else did? In my two years of living in Nashville, I’ve done all three; however, I’m beginning to learn a deeper truth regarding the homeless and urban poor: their lifestyles will change when mine does.
I live between two worlds. If you go a mile in one direction, you can pick out a new towel set at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, get fresh sushi at Kroger, and swing by the Smoothie King hut for a nutritious snack. If you go a mile in the other direction, you find people who survive off of the public transit system, don’t know much English, and live with their brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all in the same apartment.
Left is the direction of suburbia. Right is where the poor live. Sometimes, those two worlds are that close. Left is where I get stopped by Mormons with backpacks in the parking lot. Right is where graffiti colors the sides of buildings. Two worlds, right next door to each other–and I, much to my own shame, rarely turn right.
Usually, when I leave my apartment building to go pick up some groceries, rent a video, or buy a random household item like Krazy Glue, I turn left. After all, that’s where Wal-Mart is. That’s where the white people are. That’s where “safety” is.
But for some reason, I went right that day and picked up my glue at the superstore where the Hispanics do their shopping. Now, I know that sounds potentially racist, but you don’t live where I live. It is racist. It’s that segregated. Half the people in my apartment complex go where the white suburbanites shop, and the other half go where there are signs intentionally written in Spanish, so that they know what they’re purchasing. Granted, pockets of cultural concentration exist in every city, but we need to learn to occasionally cross those borders and learn from those whom we so often avoid.
Once a month, my church delivers groceries to needy families. I meet another guy around 8am on a Saturday morning, and we drive around the city dropping off boxes full of dry goods to people who lack the finances to buy groceries and the transportation to go out and get the food.
One weekend, we dropped off a box at a townhouse near Belmont University in Nashville. It was interesting, because often when we do this, someone gives us a sob story, or we see something questionable happening in the back room. But this time, none of that happened. She just cried.
Her name was Michelle, she was unemployed, living at home with her two kids and the third on the way. The dad was out of the picture. When we brought the groceries in, she couldn’t stop thanking us through teary eyes. When we offered to pray for her, she wept the whole time, repeating, “Thank you, Jesus…” We hugged her, and said goodbye, as she was still crying.
I couldn’t get that out of my mind–the sound of her sobbing, the tears. It kept me up at night, haunted me in my dreams. I thought about her for two weeks. I prayed for her, told my friends about her, shared the story with my church. And just then, when my life threatened to move on, when Michelle was about to become just another sermon illustration or a character in an article somewhere, I turned right.
My fiancée and I visited her. We brought more groceries. Other friends came to visit. We talked, laughed, and watched TV together. Once, they were out of toilet paper, so we picked up some double-ply for them. Another time, we baked cookies for the whole family. We even took her kids to the zoo. We invited Michelle and her family to church, and to my surprise, she accepted. For Thanksgiving, they joined us for a huge potluck dinner where the church embraced them. I got to know them the best that I could; we became friends.
One winter evening, two days before December 25, I showed up at their door with a Buick Century full of Christmas presents. And hope was restored. All because I made a choice to go back, to turn right, to not move on.
It’s hard not to paint stories like this without making them sound like they’re about us, the great protagonists of these stories of hope. They’re not, of course, about you or me, but we have to recognize how much is riding on us when it comes to justice. Admittedly, not every issue is as simple as turning right instead of left, but in my experience, a lot of Micah 6:8 can be fulfilled in simple, everyday choices. There are other stories, as well. I could tell you about Pat, a woman I met who had breast cancer. All I did was give her my business card. One day, she called me to say that she was about to be evicted; two weeks later, I had raised enough money to keep her from returning to homelessness. Then there’s Eugene, a “bum” who needed $11 to catch the Greyhound to Memphis, where a job was waiting for him. These stories all around us, if we will take the time to listen.
There’s a story in Scripture that goes like this:
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. (Acts)
For the longest time, I thought that the story was about healing. Maybe it wasn’t until I moved to Nashville that I was able to recognize what was really happening with Peter, John, and that lame guy. It wasn’t until I walked city streets and saw people in wheelchairs waiting outside of churches, begging. It wasn’t until I felt an inner voice telling me to just ignore them, to avert my eyes, and somehow they’d disappear from my conscience. And that’s when I saw a sentence that I had missed before: “Peter looked straight at him, as did John.” They didn’t look away. And neither should we. Sometimes, justice is just that simple. Looking into the eyes of another human being when we’d rather pretend that we didn’t see him. Choosing to schedule your life around those who are hurting and losing hope. Turning right instead of left.
I turned right instead of left. That’s all I did, and it made all the difference. I don’t know why I did it exactly. My wife had sent me out to pick up some groceries, and it was habit to turn the steering wheel left when pulling out of our apartment complex. Yet, something inside compelled me to go right, driving past the lower income housing in Southeast Nashville, where every sign quickly goes from English to Spanish to Arabic.
Although Nashville isn’t New York, it’s still a formidable city, and the largest one I have ever lived in for more than a year. When I moved here from the Midwest, it was culture shock on a lot of levels: sweet tea, deep drawls, cowboy boots, belt buckles, Christian music, SUVs, guys with haircuts styled after Jan Brady, and visible poverty. With the exception of the one guy who lived in the local park, I never really saw a lot of poor people when I was growing up or attending college. So, when I moved here, I didn’t really know what to do. These people that approached me on the streets asking for money frightened me. Did I give out of fear, point them to the nearest shelter, or just blow them off like everyone else did? In my two years of living in Nashville, I’ve done all three; however, I’m beginning to learn a deeper truth regarding the homeless and urban poor: their lifestyles will change when mine does.
I live between two worlds. If you go a mile in one direction, you can pick out a new towel set at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, get fresh sushi at Kroger, and swing by the Smoothie King hut for a nutritious snack. If you go a mile in the other direction, you find people who survive off of the public transit system, don’t know much English, and live with their brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all in the same apartment.
Left is the direction of suburbia. Right is where the poor live. Sometimes, those two worlds are that close. Left is where I get stopped by Mormons with backpacks in the parking lot. Right is where graffiti colors the sides of buildings. Two worlds, right next door to each other–and I, much to my own shame, rarely turn right.
Usually, when I leave my apartment building to go pick up some groceries, rent a video, or buy a random household item like Krazy Glue, I turn left. After all, that’s where Wal-Mart is. That’s where the white people are. That’s where “safety” is.
But for some reason, I went right that day and picked up my glue at the superstore where the Hispanics do their shopping. Now, I know that sounds potentially racist, but you don’t live where I live. It is racist. It’s that segregated. Half the people in my apartment complex go where the white suburbanites shop, and the other half go where there are signs intentionally written in Spanish, so that they know what they’re purchasing. Granted, pockets of cultural concentration exist in every city, but we need to learn to occasionally cross those borders and learn from those whom we so often avoid.
Once a month, my church delivers groceries to needy families. I meet another guy around 8am on a Saturday morning, and we drive around the city dropping off boxes full of dry goods to people who lack the finances to buy groceries and the transportation to go out and get the food.
One weekend, we dropped off a box at a townhouse near Belmont University in Nashville. It was interesting, because often when we do this, someone gives us a sob story, or we see something questionable happening in the back room. But this time, none of that happened. She just cried.
Her name was Michelle, she was unemployed, living at home with her two kids and the third on the way. The dad was out of the picture. When we brought the groceries in, she couldn’t stop thanking us through teary eyes. When we offered to pray for her, she wept the whole time, repeating, “Thank you, Jesus…” We hugged her, and said goodbye, as she was still crying.
I couldn’t get that out of my mind–the sound of her sobbing, the tears. It kept me up at night, haunted me in my dreams. I thought about her for two weeks. I prayed for her, told my friends about her, shared the story with my church. And just then, when my life threatened to move on, when Michelle was about to become just another sermon illustration or a character in an article somewhere, I turned right.
My fiancée and I visited her. We brought more groceries. Other friends came to visit. We talked, laughed, and watched TV together. Once, they were out of toilet paper, so we picked up some double-ply for them. Another time, we baked cookies for the whole family. We even took her kids to the zoo. We invited Michelle and her family to church, and to my surprise, she accepted. For Thanksgiving, they joined us for a huge potluck dinner where the church embraced them. I got to know them the best that I could; we became friends.
One winter evening, two days before December 25, I showed up at their door with a Buick Century full of Christmas presents. And hope was restored. All because I made a choice to go back, to turn right, to not move on.
It’s hard not to paint stories like this without making them sound like they’re about us, the great protagonists of these stories of hope. They’re not, of course, about you or me, but we have to recognize how much is riding on us when it comes to justice. Admittedly, not every issue is as simple as turning right instead of left, but in my experience, a lot of Micah 6:8 can be fulfilled in simple, everyday choices. There are other stories, as well. I could tell you about Pat, a woman I met who had breast cancer. All I did was give her my business card. One day, she called me to say that she was about to be evicted; two weeks later, I had raised enough money to keep her from returning to homelessness. Then there’s Eugene, a “bum” who needed $11 to catch the Greyhound to Memphis, where a job was waiting for him. These stories all around us, if we will take the time to listen.
There’s a story in Scripture that goes like this:
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. (Acts)
For the longest time, I thought that the story was about healing. Maybe it wasn’t until I moved to Nashville that I was able to recognize what was really happening with Peter, John, and that lame guy. It wasn’t until I walked city streets and saw people in wheelchairs waiting outside of churches, begging. It wasn’t until I felt an inner voice telling me to just ignore them, to avert my eyes, and somehow they’d disappear from my conscience. And that’s when I saw a sentence that I had missed before: “Peter looked straight at him, as did John.” They didn’t look away. And neither should we. Sometimes, justice is just that simple. Looking into the eyes of another human being when we’d rather pretend that we didn’t see him. Choosing to schedule your life around those who are hurting and losing hope. Turning right instead of left.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
From the Mission Field: Our AC Addiction by Rick Burnette
Here's a really interesting take on climate issues and our need for comfort from a missionary dealing with air conditioning from a very different perspective...
These days you don’t have to drive too long before coming across a hybrid car. High gasoline prices are finally having an effect. SUVs are out and hybrids, as well as other high mileage vehicles, are suddenly very much in demand. We simply can’t afford the gas.
What about homes? Families are beginning to feel the pain of electric bills. Many, particularly lower income households in colder climes, are quite worried about how they’ll be able to pay the heating bill this winter.
But, from what I’ve observed in the South, folk haven’t yet reached the point of cutting back on their beloved air conditioning. To recommend as much would be tantamount to suggesting that Southerners stop drinking sweet tea.
Let’s face it. Americans in the Sun Belt are absolutely addicted to AC. From the first warm day in April through the last gasp of Indian summer in October we’re going to have the air on.
During my childhood, 30-40 years ago, in North Carolina’s mountains, hardly anyone had air conditioners. Summers weren’t very long and we could put up with 85 degree summer afternoons as long as nighttime temps dropped below 65.
On the other hand, my bride from sultry Alabama grew up with air. After all, electricity rates of TVA and other southern utilities were cheap.
And guess who has the highest residential energy consumption in the US? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the current electricity hogs are Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
But by the time we were married, I too had grown to expect air conditioning six months out of the year. After all, it’s vital that we Southerners remain ensconced in houses, cars, offices, churches, malls and other air-conditioned life support systems for protection from temperatures of 75 degrees and above.
Then, in 1994, we moved to Thailand.
Except for a marvelous three-month “winter” reprieve during which temps range closely to what we called summer in Western Northern Carolina, it’s either hot and dry or hot and humid.
For most Thais, air conditioned homes are way out of reach. In contrast, every house we’ve rented in Thailand has had AC units. Yes, we’re wimps.
However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that we couldn’t afford to run the air 24/7. So, we decided to save it at least for sleeping. But several years ago, when energy prices started to climb and the value of the dollar began to drop, our budget would only allow air conditioning during the hottest of hot nights.
Our Thailand threshold is now 88 degrees in the bedroom at bedtime; thankfully, which isn’t that often. But we’re not complaining. Whereas we have at least some access to this luxury, the vast majority in the developing world do not. Still, my hot flash prone wife is grateful for the occasional relief offered by AC (by the way, she gave me permission to say that).
That said, we’re proof positive that Americans, even Southerners, can adjust to fewer creature comforts. And with open windows (screened of course), we can appreciate the morning song of birds, a pleasant breeze and marvel at the cooling power of strategically placed electric fans.
With regard to energy consumption and our American lifestyle, I’m afraid the day of reckoning is coming for everyone. Rising energy costs are putting upward pressure on electric bills, even in TVA-land. The poor are already feeling it.
And like those who’ve begun to park their SUVs, it may be necessary for many to give up their McMansions just to afford heating and cooling bills.
Realistically, though, we can begin weaning ourselves off of high residential energy consumption. We can lessen our energy footprints by installing compact fluorescent bulbs, switching off unnecessary lights and by moderating thermostats.
And many of us can start treating our homes a bit like hybrid cars. Whereas a Toyota Prius alternates between gasoline power and self-generated electricity, we might try cutting the AC and opening windows, especially when outside temps range between 55 and 75 degrees.
Reducing consumption, whether electricity, gasoline or water, isn’t just financially prudent, it’s a spiritual act. It means denying the flesh after a long binge of seeking extreme comfort and convenience. It means showing solidarity and Christian concern for those with less; those whose consumption footprints are far smaller than ours. And it means honoring both creation and the Creator by using resources wisely.
By the way, scientists are now reporting that Arctic ice is on the verge of an all time low. If we don’t begin moderating our high-carbon lifestyles soon, we’re likely in store for some very drastic and nasty changes.
These days you don’t have to drive too long before coming across a hybrid car. High gasoline prices are finally having an effect. SUVs are out and hybrids, as well as other high mileage vehicles, are suddenly very much in demand. We simply can’t afford the gas.
What about homes? Families are beginning to feel the pain of electric bills. Many, particularly lower income households in colder climes, are quite worried about how they’ll be able to pay the heating bill this winter.
But, from what I’ve observed in the South, folk haven’t yet reached the point of cutting back on their beloved air conditioning. To recommend as much would be tantamount to suggesting that Southerners stop drinking sweet tea.
Let’s face it. Americans in the Sun Belt are absolutely addicted to AC. From the first warm day in April through the last gasp of Indian summer in October we’re going to have the air on.
During my childhood, 30-40 years ago, in North Carolina’s mountains, hardly anyone had air conditioners. Summers weren’t very long and we could put up with 85 degree summer afternoons as long as nighttime temps dropped below 65.
On the other hand, my bride from sultry Alabama grew up with air. After all, electricity rates of TVA and other southern utilities were cheap.
And guess who has the highest residential energy consumption in the US? According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the current electricity hogs are Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
But by the time we were married, I too had grown to expect air conditioning six months out of the year. After all, it’s vital that we Southerners remain ensconced in houses, cars, offices, churches, malls and other air-conditioned life support systems for protection from temperatures of 75 degrees and above.
Then, in 1994, we moved to Thailand.
Except for a marvelous three-month “winter” reprieve during which temps range closely to what we called summer in Western Northern Carolina, it’s either hot and dry or hot and humid.
For most Thais, air conditioned homes are way out of reach. In contrast, every house we’ve rented in Thailand has had AC units. Yes, we’re wimps.
However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that we couldn’t afford to run the air 24/7. So, we decided to save it at least for sleeping. But several years ago, when energy prices started to climb and the value of the dollar began to drop, our budget would only allow air conditioning during the hottest of hot nights.
Our Thailand threshold is now 88 degrees in the bedroom at bedtime; thankfully, which isn’t that often. But we’re not complaining. Whereas we have at least some access to this luxury, the vast majority in the developing world do not. Still, my hot flash prone wife is grateful for the occasional relief offered by AC (by the way, she gave me permission to say that).
That said, we’re proof positive that Americans, even Southerners, can adjust to fewer creature comforts. And with open windows (screened of course), we can appreciate the morning song of birds, a pleasant breeze and marvel at the cooling power of strategically placed electric fans.
With regard to energy consumption and our American lifestyle, I’m afraid the day of reckoning is coming for everyone. Rising energy costs are putting upward pressure on electric bills, even in TVA-land. The poor are already feeling it.
And like those who’ve begun to park their SUVs, it may be necessary for many to give up their McMansions just to afford heating and cooling bills.
Realistically, though, we can begin weaning ourselves off of high residential energy consumption. We can lessen our energy footprints by installing compact fluorescent bulbs, switching off unnecessary lights and by moderating thermostats.
And many of us can start treating our homes a bit like hybrid cars. Whereas a Toyota Prius alternates between gasoline power and self-generated electricity, we might try cutting the AC and opening windows, especially when outside temps range between 55 and 75 degrees.
Reducing consumption, whether electricity, gasoline or water, isn’t just financially prudent, it’s a spiritual act. It means denying the flesh after a long binge of seeking extreme comfort and convenience. It means showing solidarity and Christian concern for those with less; those whose consumption footprints are far smaller than ours. And it means honoring both creation and the Creator by using resources wisely.
By the way, scientists are now reporting that Arctic ice is on the verge of an all time low. If we don’t begin moderating our high-carbon lifestyles soon, we’re likely in store for some very drastic and nasty changes.
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