A Closer Look at Life

"Closer Look" is moving!

Finding it fiscally unsound to continue paying for a service offered elsewhere for free, I have moved this blog's wildly intermittent future postings to jasonevanfleming@wordpress.com.

Hope to see you there.

Jason

Them: Part III

Alright. At long last, here is the conclusion to this little series.  It isn't all I was hoping for, but it was stopping up the works, and all the other posts were getting restless waiting in the que, as even the best of us will at times.

In review; Christ alone is the hope of the world (despite all those lousy Christians out there) because of the kind of love He commands and facilitates.  Ready, go.

One of the main reasons the Christian church has gotten such a bad rap in the area of inclusivity is that Christians in West, (and particularly America) have been operating out of our theology to an unhealthy degree.

This is not to say that Calvanist vs. Armenian or even Protestant vs. Catholic isn’t of some value. After all, staking your life on the claims of any religion is serious business. It should be examined to the fullest extent possible to make sure that errors of sentimentality, logic or scholarship have not been committed. As we are not all capable of or interested in sounding the murky depths of the scholarly side of our faiths, we must come up with a rule book of sorts; a shorthand for living. Thus theology.

I submit, however, that we as American Evangelicals have utterly mistaken the purpose of theology when we have allowed our suppositions to govern how and when we carry out the more clear cut directives of Scripture. Theology exists to simplify the complex, not the other way around. Evangelical Christians have allowed the mechanics of salvation and sanctification, an area that is admittedly fraught with debate and ambiguity, to dictate the manner in which we carry out simple directives of Christ.

Love others sacrificially is not a complex statement. It is a near impossibility to actualize, but it is not hard to comprehend. He has told us that we are to be responsible for sacrificing ourselves for the well-being of others. He will take care of the rest, even to carrying the responsibility for the ultimate destination of their souls.

The love that will change the world is truly costly. It will cost lives, homes, fortunes, time, relationships, comfort and most of all, our narrow, self-interested perspective. This love cannot exist in a soul that is still seeking its own good first. This love is not immediately mutually beneficial. It is also more powerful than all the hate and evil this world has to offer.

This costly love can only come from knowing that we are loved in turn by a God that has our best interest in mind. Only when we are free of the worry that we must take care of our needs will we be able to shower the people around us with ridiculously inclusive, life-altering love.

This is the route to peace in the world. This is how a rich nation like the USA can decide not to spend its money on itself and reach beyond its borders to bless people half a world away that will never be able to thank them. This is how people can choose to lay aside the possible consequences of not fighting for their ideology and reach out beyond political and social barriers to serve someone. Simply put, it is the power of trusting that your needs, safety and desires are in the hands of Someone more powerful.

What is more, this love is freely given. It is not an investment, a half-trusting down payment expecting a return. (If it were, it would not be love at all.) It is not an action taken out of the faux-altruistic self-fulfillment of “feeling better” about what you can do for others. The love of Christ does not compel people to reach out with what little time and resources they have because they know their limited supply will be used well. It is a love that is spent extravagantly with no expectation of return because it comes from an endless supply.

This is why wells get built in African villages when the residents will never know the names of the donors. This is why girls are pulled out of prostitution rings in South Asian brothels, only to need an expensive education and rehabilitation program to keep them going in life. This is why business executives take time out of their schedules to visit and train men in prison who have become a burden on and a danger to society.

If you are like me, you may have spent a few idle minutes here and there thinking about what you would do with limitless resources to change the world. I imagine what I would do if I had more money that I could ever spend, and then I start thinking about what I would do if more people had that kind of money to give away.

In the end, it isn’t loads of money being given away that will change the world. It is love being given away. Love without end, without conditions, and without cost. That is a love that Christ alone can offer.

Them: Part II

I realize the claim with which I ended my last post may come across as rather far fetched to some.  Christianity has gotten poor scores on inclusivity throughout its history, and in contemporary America, there are few organizations except the NRA that are popularly regarded as being more reactionary and irrationally, combatively traditionalist.

Elements of secular humanism, on the other hand, have led the charge in the last century to preach a message of unity and connectedness in our increasingly factionalized world. In doing so, I believe they have hit upon perhaps the greatest question facing mankind today. How are we supposed to get along?

As two centuries of global political order based on the nation-state as the primary political actor wanes, we see an increased movement towards ethno-specific or religiously exclusivist self-identification. In response to the homogeneity of market capitalist-led globalism, people are turning to ethnicity, religion, geography, language, culture and even subculture to try to define the boundaries of the people group to whom they will swear allegiance.  It can appear that we are moving backwards away from the unity of humanity that had been such a fervent hope for much of the last century.

I have not studied every one of the worlds religions in depth, but to my limited experience, every other system of belief on the planet has its boundaries. Some contain a linguistic barrier such as Islam, or ethnic designations such as Judaism. Those which are more inclusive on those terms still stop short of true inclusiveness by mandating practices of dress, behavior, diet and worship that are inextricably tied to their culture of origin. Some systems of belief are so tied to their respective culture or polities that them is a political term, with no spiritual or relational component even coming into consideration.

The fact is, there is no religion on earth that preaches the radical sort of inclusiveness that Christianity proclaims.  Even the Uniterian Universalists (who have no creeds and therefore no comprehensive belief at all) and Bahá’I (whose amalgamation of multiple religions is logically inconsistent in that it believes mutually exclusive claims of differing religions to be related to each other in a process of progressive revelation) do not go to the extremity that Christ does.

Make no mistake. Christians have a positively awful track record of practicing this culture-crossing, barrier-breaking inclusiveness. For the past two millennia, uncounted horrors have been perpetrated on mankind in the name of Christ. From the Crusades to the Inquisition, the Conquistadors to the KKK, the cross of Christ has been used as a weapon in truly appalling ways. Christ on the other hand, saw things differently.

To properly understand Christ’s views on this issue, one has to distinguish between the regrettable actions of Christians and the teachings and actions of Christ.  Christians exhibiting violence, hatred and divisiveness are not proper examples of their faith. On the contrary, Christians are the only people to whom their respective deity has given a mandate to love everyone, as well as providing the power to carry out that divine vision of unity.

In brief, Christ commanded his disciples to love all people everywhere as though they were family. Something does not come from nothing in this world, and love is no exception.  God, through Christ has chosen to love mankind so completely, so radically, so deeply that were we to recognize and respond to that love, there would be no end to the love that we could give to our fellow man. 

What is more, Christ gave us only one defining characteristic of the love that we are to show for everyone.  “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

This simple line introduced to mankind a definition of sacrificial love unparalleled in any other system or belief or thought that had come before or has arisen since.  Christ did not set out parameters for the worthiness of being loved that someone must show.  HE did not say that political boundaries, racial differences or religious disparities could be used as excuses not to love someone.  HE did not tell us the point at which we are allowed to seek selfish ambition at the expense of others.  HE did not give us an out when love has become difficult or costly.  Barriers and boundaries set upon the love God lavished on and entrusted to mankind were set by man himself.  On the contrary, Christ has commanded those who would follow him to seek out self-sacrificing, costly, love for their fellow man without regard to any of the differences we humans seek to identify and accentuate.

What then, does this have to do with politics?  How does this definition of love really constitute the hope of the world? 

More to come…

Them

One of my frustrations with the blogosphere, and contemporary American culture at large, is that it is not well suited to topics that take more than 500 words to cover. Communication must adapt, however, and in every system, there is a solution. In today’s media, it is called “To be continued…”

Over the next few posts I will be dealing with some larger issues that I have refrained from addressing due to my inability to express myself succinctly on certain topics. Hopefully, these multi-part posts will provide the proper venue for dealing with these issues. They might also be dramatically dull, but they are immensely fascinating to me. Hopefully they will be worthwhile to some degree.

I recently had a long, long conversation with a friend of mine about the utility, purpose and worth of the Gospel, particularly as it relates to the confusing world we live in. I stated that I believed the Gospel to be the only hope for mankind; a strong claim in a pluralistic world where we find increasing incompatibilities and mutual incomprehensibilities across the broad spectrum of religious, ethnic and cultural divides.

My friend’s position, and a compelling one it is, questions whether the great weight of the innumerable failings of the church over the last two millennia crowd out the good it has done, and even draws into question its validity as an institution in the first place, let alone its ability to claim any sort of superiority over other systems of belief.

He is not alone in this opinion, of course. There are many who would agree with him asking what right the church has to claim any moral or ideological high ground. Crosby, Stills and Nash summed up the sentiment of this dissenting opinion well in the chorus of their song “Cathedral.”

“Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all.”

What argument is there to support the Gospel against these accusations? While there are many Christians who lack the capacity to explain or defend their beliefs at all, much of the remainder would attempt to defend of their faith through some kind of dissertation on the wonder of Salvation, the truth and importance of the Resurrection, attempt a comparative analysis of Christianity vis-a-vis other religious systems or get caught in the quagmire of attempting to defend the historicity of the Scriptures.

All of these defenses have value insomuch as they help explain the what of Christianity, but, salvation aside, they don’t go very far down the road of explaining why, which is the essential question in the first place. At least not the why our culture is asking. To explain that why, you have to find something that is unique, something that is intrinsically and uniquely valuable which is the sole purview of the Christian Faith.

This explanation mush be universal and translatable beyond the borders of cultures, nation-states, ethnicities and languages. It must be a hope that can live within any cultural context without destroying it. It must address to the essence of our humanity, rather than a particular expression of it. It must have a solution for the suffering and divisiveness that is now so visibly endemic in our world.

The reason I believe the Gospel is the one hope of the world is that I believe it holds just such a universal hope that addresses a universal need. I believe it is the only system of belief that doesn’t have a “them.”

To be continued...

In other words...

One of the main reasons I post so infrequently to this blog is arrogance about my own words and thoughts.  I prize originality very highly, and have to confess that I often judge those who copy the words of others in place of generating their own ideas or expressions. The downside to this is that I often fail to pass on the words and ideas that inspire me; words and ideas that are probably better than mine.

There are times, however, when something cuts through the fog. The following is an allegedly Franciscan blessing whose origin I do not yet know.  Some preliminary research has not revealed its history, but it appears to be popular with Episcopalians and discontented, artsy evangelical bloggers.  (wait a minute...)

Regardless of its origin, the following is probably dangerous if prayed earnestly.  That could also make it deeply important. Whether you approach it as a prayer, a blessing or simply an expansion of perspective, it is a valuable little set of hopes.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
Amen.

         

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
Amen.

         

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection,starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
Amen.

         

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.

         

And the Blessing of God, who Creates, Redeems and Sanctifies, be upon you and all you love an pray for this day, and forever more.
Amen.

Amen indeed.

Busy signals

It should be painfully obvious by now that I am having some problems keeping up with this blog.  I would like to say it is the crazy pace of life that we live here in America, but that is only part of the problem. (In and of itself, this is quite a statement about the journey that I am currently on as I process the events that led to the creation of this little site.)

To be honest, life has been busy.  I doubt many Americans who are actively engaged in their jobs and social circles have a tremendous amount of free time for ventures on the side.  I am no exception.  Beyond the harried pace, I find that there is something else that has kept me from posting.  I simply don’t know what to say.

It is no secret that trying to live a moderately productive life here in America has an anesthetic affect on the soul and the mind.  To keep either alive, you must constantly seek out stimulating circumstances and people, or be exposed to a great amount of pain.  Perhaps lamentably, most Americans don’t seem to have time for the first, and as humans we all have a natural aversion to the second. 

This is what has happened to me in the last few months.  I feel that the jarring experience of seeing poverty and destitution first hand are now quite distant to me, as though I were on lithium (at least from what I have heard of the experience) and the world is passing by just outside my reach. 

I find myself dealing with the quandary that many evangelical Christians experience spiritually, and many of my generation at large experience emotionally.  I am trying to find out what to do when the bright, hot fire of emotional, engrossing experience that woke me up from the daze of living day to day has dimmed to a small ember in a bed of grey ashes. 

I am honestly at a loss as to what to do about what I have seen.  Perhaps this is the quintessential challenge of my generation.  We are increasingly aware of the suffering and injustice in the world, and yet we are, by and large, incapable of doing anything substantive about it.

For me, the confusing and disheartening part is not the fraud and abuse that plagues international aid agencies or the ignorant, abusive, draconian policies of governments around the world. It isn’t even the seemingly paltry means I have at my disposal to enact change. 

The challenge is not knowing what to do with my own life. 

This blog is evidence of this.  However militantly intent I may have been about this being a mouthpiece for the poor that I met in Ethiopia, it has been dying on the vine for months as I get on with the business of having a wife to love, a job to work and, in general, a life to live.  Even this simple act of attempting to publicize my thoughts about injustice in the world has turned into a commentary on my own place in the ranks of busy, self-focused Americans I am in the habit of decrying.

I do not condemn myself for this.  Rather I lament it.  Perhaps I am coming to discover a little of what Jesus was talking about when he was here on earth.  While He never said it outright, I don’t think He understood that you only have time to live one life.  If you are intent on taking care of yourself and managing your life, you aren’t likely to have much time left over to help other people out.

What is more, when you are busy, you don’t have a lot of time to look around and listen

At any rate, I expect to be posting again more frequently, although the topics and focus of this blog are likely to change a little over the next few posts. 

If you are out there reading, thanks for sticking around, particularly through this uniquely introspective (self-absorbed?) post.

Memories of Addis, Part 3

I originally tried to post the following story from a cyber-café in Addis, but internet connections, like many things in the developing world cannot be relied on to deliver the dependable service we anticipate in the West.  When I got back to the states I discovered that the post had disappeared, never to be seen again.

The café was in a squat little building that opened onto the alley behind our hotel.   We tried many cyber-cafés around our hotel, and this one was certainly the slowest.  On one side of the café was a travel agency that seemed surprisingly official, given its humble location.  The rest of the row of shops was taken up with the kind of clothing stores and other shops that seem to be in the act of vomiting forth their entire product line right as you walk by.  In front of every establishment, save the café, a small group of young men stood about talking and eyeing us curiously as we walked past. 

We needed only to walk halfway abound the block to get to the café.  Regardless, it was still quite a production for being such a short journey.  We had not gone 20 yards form the hotel before we had attracted a small army of interested locals, all intent on selling us something.  We had the pleasure of their company until we were safely inside the café, and even then their entreaties reached us through the door.

Among the many varieties of hawkers, there were little girls, dressed in rags and seeming only to know the English words “hungry” and “please!”.  Despite their unkempt appearance, they all had shoe-box sized trays of gum and mints, as neatly stocked and packaged as any gum display in an American convenience store. At first, my heart went out to them.  The more of them we saw, the inevitable question arose.  “Where did they get all the gum?”

The all too disheartening answer is that they got the gum from the people they work for.  Perhaps it was a parent or relative.  Perhaps it was their owner, and they were working as indentured servants or slaves.  Likely as not, these little girls, still shy of their first double digit birthday, were probably orphans and were forced to work as beggars in a racket where someone else gets to keep all the profits. 

There were also the shoe-shine boys.  Usually in their early teens, these boys could be seen all over town carrying their small box of shine and rags.  They seemed to be in one of the legitimate informal businesses of the streets, as I saw many an Ethiopian taking advantage of their services.  They were quite insistent, and it took a very stern tone to dismiss them, which was harder to muster than I expected.  Feeling the lump of money in my pocket, I thought of how glad they would be to have it, but I knew it could be unwise and even dangerous to give in.

Older and more aggressive than these two groups were the “friends.”  These men in their early 20s all knew English well, and were eager to make your acquaintance.  “Hey!  My friend!” they would call from beyond the hotel gate before we even reached it.  After that salutation would come a running stream of offers of all kinds.  Walking into a business or getting into a car seemed the only way to be rid of them once they latched on to you. 

We encountered all these groups on our short walk to the café.  The hierarchy was evident, and the little girls were shushed away by the shoe-shine boys who were, in turn, dispatched by the “friends.”  We had misjudged the opening time of the café, and were thus subjected to a barrage of questions as we stood on the street for a couple minutes while the girl inside wiped the screens with a damp cloth. 

“Who is your friend?”

“Where are you from?”

“Do you want to go on a tour of the city?”

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Do you need a taxi?”
(Here we were mercifully allowed inside.  Our interrogators stayed in the doorway, lobbing questions in at us like hand grenades. 
“Are you looking for a party?”

“Do you want a girl?”

Scott’s head snapped around.  I looked up at the questioner in the doorway.  His face was covered in the hideous smile that evil men the world over use to feign trustworthiness when they seek to harm their fellow man.  It was an evil, shark’s smile.

“No… we don’t want a girl.” Scott responded in a slow measured tone.  His rebuff came out like a threat. 

It must have gotten the point across, or that was the last option in the bag, because the men left shortly after, assuring us that they would be around when we needed them. 

I sat there dumbfounded.  It is one thing seeing a kid on the street reduced to performing a menial task for pennies to survive.  It is worse to see kids being forced to sell a product so others can benefit.  It is another thing entirely to be offered another human being for pure entertainment or convenience, as though she were no more important than a taxi or a stack of black-market DVD’s. 

I don’t know if those two characters could personally have found a prostitute for us if we had agreed to it.  I do not doubt, however, that somewhere on the other end of a chain of partners and contacts, a real woman, or more probably, a young girl was waiting for her next bit of work somewhere in a shanty or a low, dirty building.  In all probability she was a slave, trafficked in from the countryside of Ethiopia.  She may have even been sold by her own family to pay off debt, or simply to buy food.  She may have been forced to serve several men a day, never seeing a dime of the substantial profit she was turning for her masters.  If she was not already infected with HIV, it is only a matter of time until she will be.

Looking back on this encounter, I am deeply saddened at the willingness of those two men to violate the most fundamental of rules God (and many other religions and social codes) gave for human interaction: to protect and take care of one another.  Given the hard, unforgiving life they had probably lived, I suppose their actions are not surprising.

What is surprising, however, is something Scott pointed out to me later.  They would not ask visiting foreigners if they wanted a prostitute at the sobering hour of 9:00 in the morning (on a weekday) unless sometimes the answer is “yes”.

Who's Hungry?

While the Great Leap Forward is a fascinating study in the systemic failure of communism as a functional governing system, I do not mention it here to critique it for its untenable ideological underpinnings.  I bring it up because it offers us a unique perspective on hunger.

In the history of bad ideas, there are few worse than the Great Leap Forward.  The plan, implemented by the Communist Chinese government in 1958, was targeted at increasing the production of the agricultural and industrial sectors of the Chinese economy by taking advantage of the seemingly endless labor pool of the Chinese peasantry. By the time the plan was scrapped and grain imports began in 1961, some estimates put the death toll from starvation at more than 40 million people. 

It has been reported that many of the people who died during the Great Leap forward did not die from simple lack of nutrients.  They were poisoned.  Finding no suitable food source, many peasants had begun looking for any alternative, going so far as to consume the very dirt they farmed in an attempt to gain any form of nutrient they could possibly find.  Not surprisingly, eating large amounts of soil, an activity the human digestive system was never designed for, quickly proved fatal. 

I first heard this from a Chinese history professor in college.  What was meant as an illustrative anecdote has stuck with me ever since.  That was the first time I was exposed to the idea that starvation is not simply the lack of something to eat.  It is the lack of  something that nourishes. 

As an example, look no further than our own chronically obese population.

There are some in medicine today that suggest that one of the major causes of obesity in America is not, in fact, overeating.  For many people, losing weight has less to do with quantity of food consumed and more to do with quality. 

There is medical evidence that shows if the body is not provided adequate nutrients, it will begin storing anything it can process as fat, thinking that lean times are at hand.  As a result, the person trying to lose weight by simply cutting the number of  Diet Cokes they drink and eating one less Big Mac a week is actually fighting upstream.  By simply providing the body with less junk food, they may be raising the rate at which the body is storing fat, thus abrogating much of the potential weight loss purchased with their lowered caloric intake.  Sadly, this is not the sort of weight loss news to get headlines.

This notion of starvation as a lack of nutrients has broader application than understanding why America is morbidly obese, why we care what kind of gas mileage we get, or what will happen to the poor Somalis that can no longer buy grain with their devalued currency. 

Beyond these more visible, tangible forms of starvation lie the emotional starvation of orphans and those widowed by war and other tragedies.  There is also the relational starvation that can be found in the most affluent American suburbs where busy parents throw money at the increasing angst of their children who are crying to be noticed and loved.  We see the same principle at work in porn addicts, adrenaline junkies and alcoholics; all trying to squeeze some feeling from their empty addiction.  The list of hungers of the human spirit is nearly endless.  Beyond, or perhaps beneath, even these forms of hunger lies the spiritual starvation experienced by nearly everyone on the planet.  It is not a starvation that many would admit to, or even notice. 

Hunger occurs when a basic need, be it physical, emotional or spiritual, is not met.  I believe every human has a hunger within them for the Divine.  Opinion may vary on this point, but I believe the preponderance of evidence throughout history is in favor of this claim.  Throughout time and across the world, people struggle to find higher meaning, greater significance; some kind of transcendent knowledge that satisfies the mind and soul.  Whether it is Buddhism, Christianity, Secular Humanism, Islam, Money or a host of other alternatives; all of us are looking for something.  We all have souls that need to be fed, and even the best human relationships and most ideal physical conditions fall pitifully short.

It is on this point that the experiences of Chinese, peasant farmers becomes salient for me.  That they would resort to poisoning themselves by eating dirt in an attempt to avoid starvation reminds me that when hunger becomes great enough, any alternative, no matter how foolish and empty, will become a viable option.  Similarly, the frustration of the overweight fast food junkie reminds me that abstaining from an empty, unhealthy thing does not always equate to filling myself with something valuable and substantive.

When I wake up each day, I am faced with a question common to all mankind.  All our souls our hungry; what are we going to fill them with? 

1 "Come, all you who are thirsty,
       come to the waters;
       and you who have no money,
       come, buy and eat!
       Come, buy wine and milk
       without money and without cost.

2 Why spend money on what is not bread,
       and your labor on what does not satisfy?
       Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
       and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

3 Give ear and come to me;
       hear me, that your soul may live.
       I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
       my faithful love promised to David.

                                                    Isaiah 55:1-3

There is no promise more glorious than God’s.  There is no food so satisfying to the soul as His love. 

There are no reasons but fear or pride to refuse that which is given for free.

Driven to Starvation

If one reads the news these days, there is no escaping the panicked stories about the rising cost of staple grains.  There is little doubt that the world’s population is getting larger, and hungrier, by the day.  One may well wonder what has brought this seemingly cataclysmic condition upon us so quickly.  Many different groups are being accused of causing this new crisis, with the average Chinese peasant, Western alternative energy producers and commodities traders in the Philippines standing together in the line-up.  I suggest a different cause; one that hits a little closer to home.

In less than two months, global news coverage of the plight of the hungry has gone from non-existent to a full fledged feeding frenzy, no pun intended. Even bio-fuel manufacturing is being senselessly implicated in this terror of the month. Some news reporters, and even news makers, seem to have forgotten that a substantial portion of US corn production is dedicated to producing corn-based sweeteners for non-essential products like Coca-Cola.  Much land is also used to grow corn used to feed cattle that are helping to meet the rising demand for diary and beef in rapidly growing Asian markets. 

Feeding the world’s hungry is certainly a growing problem.  Whoever you blame, the fact remains that the global population is continuing to grow, and it must be fed.  This is a new kind of hunger too, with the new concentrations of the under-fed being found in urban areas rather than impoverished rural settings. 

When we were in Ethiopia, we were told that the government there had undertaken actions to raise the price of the indigenous staple grain teff by nearly 600% in less than two years.  The plan was designed to help impoverished farmers by artificially raising the price of their biggest product.  While it accomplished the increase in the price of teff, it has also brought about a predictable rise in farming related goods and services, thus abrogating much of the anticipated windfall for the farmers. 

The farmers, many barely more than subsistence grade, have so far weathered the storm. The business of fighting to grow enough to survive is not so susceptible to fickle market forces.  In the cities, however, millions of poor are facing an astronomic increase in the cost of food, often the largest portion of their budgets.

In reality, however, the commodities traders, bio-fuel makers and even Coke drinkers are only a small part of the problem.  Perhaps the biggest reason food prices are rising is the increasing cost of oil. 

Around the world, the urban, jobless poor are finding themselves at the mercy of seemingly unrelated issues half a world away.  Unrest in the Niger delta, American foreign policy in the Gulf, frustratingly shrewd production caps by OPEC, huge SUVs on Western highways and pension related strikes in Scotland continue to push the cost of oil into historically high territory. The knock-on effects are felt at every level the world over.

Today we are beginning to see a new kind of hunger.  With farming techniques and technology continuing to raise production levels across the industrialized world, the availability of food-stuffs is growing.  Shortage of resources is no longer the problem.  The cost of transportation, thanks to rising oil prices, and the hoarding of staple goods through commodities trading on futures markets is driving the cost of staple foods higher and higher.  Across the world grocery store shelves are full of food.  The problem is, no one has the money to buy it.  We are entering a new era where global production and allocation of resources and commodities must be more intentional and directed if it is to meet rising demands. 

We are entering a period of history unlike any known before.  We will soon find ourselves in a world where others suffer not from our inaction or our lack of charity.  People will begin to suffer when we fail to use our resources wisely.  Compassion for the poor will soon be more closely related to the conscientious use of our resources than many of us ever expected. 

We as Americans, and particularly the Christians among us have an opportunity, and, I think, an obligation to help prevent a crisis that may soon affect people we will never meet.  If we were to merely engage in the simple, yet frustratingly interdependent, act of carpooling, we could have large effects on the quality of life of those living in the fragile economies of the developing world.  As the largest consumer of oil on the planet, Americans have the greatest potential to lower demand for oil by making small changes in our daily lives, thus lowering the price of oil, and by extension, the price of food in developing countries. 

The question at hand is not a matter of resource shortages.  It is simply that Americans and those in other westernized countries are not economical with their resources because it is not convenient for them to do so.  In a purely Darwinian view of life, selfless economization is not a matter of concern.  The Haves can do as they wish, and charity is an option. 

On this point, the Gospel of Christ differs greatly from the conventional wisdom.  From what I have read of the Bible, I am to consider everyone the world over as family.  Christians are called, I believe, to act with the interests of others in mind, even when there is no direct benefit to themselves.  After all, that is the basic definition of love. 

While on earth, Christ called us to and then exemplified compassion; by definition “suffering with” those he encountered.  My “suffering” could begin by riding a bike to work, getting up a little earlier to catch a bus or even buying a smaller, more efficient car so that others can eat.  To me, that seems a light burden to bear to begin fulfilling the commands of God. 

Ends and Means

One of the most unfortunate confusions that Americans have about life is that we see the physical things we possess as ends, rather than as means to greater truths that lie beyond them. 

Living in Colorado, I drive on roads that are populated with a high percentage of off-road vehicles.  One can barely drive a block without seeing an enormous truck or SUV rumbling along on its huge tires.  A large portion of these land barges are the over-stuffed, fluffy, suburbanite cruisers such as Toyota Sequoias, Chevy Tahoes and Nissan Armadas; vehicles that will never see off-road duty, and aren’t even designed to in any case.  For the most part, they are simply ego stimulus packages for Gen-X soccer moms and dads who don’t want to admit that they need a minivan.  Their atrocious fuel economy aside, these brontosaural heaps are largely benign and have the benefit of being handy in the event of light snow.

There is another breed of vehicle that seems to be increasing in numbers, however.  Comprised mostly of elephantine trucks, (think lifted Dodge Rams and Ford F-350s) this new species can be spotted blocks away, towering over the cars they (sometimes) share the road with.  They are easily spotted by their obscenely large lift-kits and/or low profile tires and huge, over-sized rims, often painted black and aggressively styled.  These trucks give the impression of an almost militant, testosterone-soaked outlook that says “I need this truck because I breathe.  Sorry if you get run over, but this is what I need because I am just this hardcore.”

There is only one problem.  They aren’t hardcore.  They are merely hard-shelled.

I will spare you the details, but even from my limited understanding of off-roading, I know that many of these chrome-laden, jacked-up rigs lack some of the most basic equipment (and geometry) to really tackle the rigors of the unimproved mountain roads of Colorado.  This leads me to question why people are spending so much money creating these monsters.  To me, the answer is a matter of confusing ends with means.

This is not just a rant against silly trucks.  In many spheres of life I see a steady progression away from functionality toward form and appearance.  This is emblematic of a shift in how American culture handles possessions, due in large part to the blitzkrieg of visual advertising content we are exposed to.

In the case of the big trucks, many people driving these vehicles have little interest in the actual act of off-roading.  It is about the perceived value in possessing a vehicle that looks capable of doing so.  Perhaps it allegedly says something about their outlook on life, their capacity to cope with danger, or their potential virility and thus capacity to mate. 

In one sense, this image projection is the essential purpose of possessions as preached to us by the ads that bombard us daily.  When content driven, informative advertising finally gave way to ideological, worldview-forming marketing somewhere in the 1980's, (the shift from what you need to who you are) we were put at the mercy of a doctrine that says the possession of the thing itself is more important than the function of the item. 

“So what?” you ask.

The “so what” is that we, as a people, are increasingly divorced from critical examination of the things we buy, as the simple act of possessing them is sufficient reason to pull out our wallets.  We no longer think of possessions as a means in the traditional sense.  They have become ends in and of themselves, locking up our energy, our time, our money, our worries and even our worship in cold, dead, manufactured things.

What is troubling about this shift is that it prevents us from seeing any higher goal or purpose to our work, our play or even our lives than the act of acquiring possessions.  Caught up in the labor of buying things to establish an identity or provide experiential fulfillment, we miss the opportunity to connect with substantive activity in life.  We miss the chance, or rather forego it volitionally, to tangibly change, impact or even enter into the lives of people around us. 

This isn’t about feeling guilty every time we get into our cars or pull out our smart phones.  It is about trying to look through the hype to ask “why” in everything we do and everything we buy.  When we begin to ask this question, the substantial, satisfying answers will soon begin to stand out from the crowd of imposters. 

To me, this question matters because I believe there is an ultimate Why.  I believe His love for us and His perspective on life are more valuable than anything we can possess.  I believe working for and in line with his purposes is the ultimate End.  Everything else must be a means for me to reach Him, or I will fall pitifully short of the full wonder of existence.