Life on a Dollar a Day

Although the debt ceiling crisis has passed (at least temporarily), I continue to think about what the future will look like. I see a growing divide between the haves and have-nots of this world, with North Americans in general falling into the category of haves in comparison to the majority of the world's population. In light of this, I recommend the following blog on what it means practically to live on a dollar a day, which is considered to be the standard of extreme poverty, as the author explains. The author considers the topic in two separate blog entries, part one being here and part two here.

Debt Ceilings and Living Responsibly

The political storm surrounding the debt ceiling has given much food for thought concerning responsible living. Both parties accuse the other of irresponsible spending and have demonstrated little willingness to compromise. Republicans blame the Democrats and the Democrats blame the Republicans. No one seems to accept that both parties are responsible for the mess we're in, that the overspending that has brought us to this point has been going on for years. Of course to admit that would be to admit that we have built our entire lifestyle around consumption. We have established a mindset that we deserve it all and we deserve it now, regardless of whether we need it or can truly afford it. If government has grown used to spending more than it earns, ultimately it has done so because we the people have asked more and more of it while wanting to give it less and less of our money. It seems that what most people want is a solution that will allow them to continue living this lifestyle without pain or sacrifice. From what I hear people say around me and on TV, from what I see reported in the news, people are wondering how long it will take to get through this time of difficulty so that we can get back to living the “good life” again.

What if living the good life is precisely what has brought us to this brink of collapse? What if we all accepted that we don't have to have it all and we certainly don't have to have it all now? A friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to an article in an Australian newspaper. This article pointed out that we do not hear the word austerity used in any discussion of how to bring the country out of this difficult time. We're not willing to live responsibly, if responsible living means giving up all those nice extras that we believe we deserve.

I do not want to see our country go into default on its debt. That would not be responsible. But I wonder whether, if it does, the ensuing collapse might in the long run be good for us and for the world. Would it force us to live more simply? It would certainly be painful and the effects would be far-reaching. But even as I fear the possible consequences, I can see how they might produce a beneficial result in the long run. (I am not advocating for default nor do I intend to indicate support for either political party's preferred solution here.)

As I reestablish myself and my family in this country after a period of living overseas, I am trying to determine what it means for us to live responsibly. What things do we truly need and what things would simply be nice to have, should we be in a position to acquire them? How can we live such that we free up as much of our resources as possible to share with those in other parts of the world who live in much more difficult circumstances? I don't have definite answers to these questions, but I have written three principles to help guide me in my decisions: 1) Strive to live with less, 2) Strive to give more to others and 3) Strive for a healthy, sustainable lifestyle (environmentally, financially, emotionally, spiritually, etc.) These principles don't define every choice in every situation, but they give me a framework to help me as I make decisions.

I'd like to think that the current political impasse will result in fundamental changes to our consumer culture. But realistically I doubt they will. However the issue is resolved, I fear that we will simply continue to try to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle until we really do reach a point of collapse. Maybe this will not be the case, but personally I want to try and live responsibly so that other people, both the poor of the world now and those who will come after me, might be able to live balanced lives as well. If a little austerity on my part can help that happen, then it will be well-invested.

Two Roads Diverged in the Middle of the Wood

This summer my family and I returned to the US from our work overseas for a couple months of rest and refreshment. At least that was how we envisioned it when we came back. The past two years have been very successful in terms of our work with minority language groups. However, that progress has cost us greatly as a family. We have struggled to meet the needs of our children as they move into their teenage years. We do not advocate building family life around the goal of making our children happy, but at the same time we do need to be aware of their needs and not sacrifice them on some false altar of ministry.

During our time in Arizona over the past month it became increasingly clear that we needed to make a radical change in order to keep our family healthy. We thought we had another year to work out the next step, but certain needs have pushed that time frame into the immediate present. Because of this we decided that we should relocate to the US for the next few years while our children complete high school. During that time my wife and I will continue our work with minority language groups, but will do so remotely. This will present a number of challenges, but will allow us to provide our children with the support they need during these important years. Living among the people groups also had challenges and the price was paid most heavily by the children. Now we will focus more on them while moving the work ahead on a slower path.

I wrestled a lot with this decision, because we have invested heavily over the past few years to establish our work. At first I felt that the only choice we had was to sacrifice our family by remaining in location and continuing to work as we had been, or to sacrifice the work by leaving the location and focusing on our family. Neither was a desirable option to me. I spoke at length with my pastor about this and he, without pushing me to any decision, challenged me to open my hand and not cling to what I felt was God's plan for me. He told me to let go and let God direct me/us in the next step. I had been paralyzed by fear, fear of the unknown and fear that our needs would not be adequately met if we made any major change. I also feared the impact on my identity. Who would I be if I were not doing the work I enjoy?

Faced with certain realities in our lives at present, the decision became quite apparent and in some sense made itself. But I still had to choose to accept it. I am still working through the impact of this on me personally, on us as a family and on our work and I hope to share some of this journey with my readers in the weeks and month ahead. Some voices argue that we should sacrifice all for the sake of the Good News, including our very family. They point to the lives of great men and women of God in the past who left family behind while pursuing their "ministry" and they hold such people up as models for us to emulate. But I question whether this is truly the "godly" choice. God is teaching me these days that if I listen to him, he can open up new paths that I might not have considered if I clung to my "ministry" at all costs. And in this new path he can continue to teach me and work through me while at the same time caring for the needs of my family. It does require sacrifice and the sacrifice is painful. But it brings blessing, at least I believe it will and have been affirmed in this choice by people I greatly respect and admire.

In the first days of working through this decision I felt great anguish over what it would cost me and the things I would have to leave behind. My focus was on the loss. But after some time God began to turn my focus toward the possibilities and opportunities that lie ahead. It doesn't mean that I won't have to give anything up or make any sacrifices. It doesn't make those sacrifices less painful or easier. But it does help me look ahead with hope and anticipation, rather than remaining stuck in the past or present in grief and sorrow. I wish sometimes that the journey of faith was a nice walk along a manicured path. It's not, because faith requires me to step into the unknown and put complete trust in a God whose ways I do not fully understand--far from it. Growing in faith is painful and exhausting. But it is also joyful and filled with hope. I invite you to continue walking on this journey with me.

Messiness

I awoke this morning thinking, for some reason, about messiness. Perhaps I had this on my mind because our house is a bit messy at the moment. Well, actually it’s always messier than I would prefer it and I have been learning over the years to not worry so much about that. I like to have my world neat and tidy. This includes my physical world and my mental, emotional and spiritual worlds. But as I thought about this I realized that life is messy. Rarely does life cooperate and arrange itself in a nice, orderly manner with no loose ends and unresolved issues.

I’d like faith to be neat and tidy. We often pretend that it is. We write and read books about God that describe him in clear, definite terms, without fuzziness and ambiguity. And by our efforts to describe God we attempt to tame him. But, as C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “he is not a tame lion.” And faith is not a simple thing, all neat and tidy, wrapped up and packaged as a pleasant complete kit that I can purchase off the shelf in my local church or Christian bookstore. Faith is messy. God doesn’t deliver when I want or expect him to. He doesn’t always act as I believe he should. While Jesus Christ may be the same yesterday, today and forever (a statement I would affirm, for those who may doubt), his manner of displaying his personal consistency is remarkably variable. I long for certainty, but in my search for answers I often find only more questions. I envy those for whom faith is a settled, certain thing. For me it is a journey, a quest. I believe, but even after all these years of walking with God I am still seeking, trying to understand and make some sense of this messy thing called the life of faith. I don’t have all the answers. And I don’t have to.

But this morning I realized that messiness is okay, even in matters of faith. Just as I can learn to live without having my living room neat and tidy, I can live with having a faith that still wrestles with questions and even doubts. In fact, such a faith may enable me to flex with the changing context in which I live. My faith, because it is not rigid, does not crumble if one item becomes weak or questioned. This does not mean that there is no foundation to my faith. There is. Faith cannot be just anything I want it to be. I have an object of my faith—Jesus Christ the crucified and risen one. Other elements form the core of my faith as well. But there remains a lot of messiness to it—like a workshop in which a project is on-going. Sometime, at the end of the project, it will all come together into a beautiful finished work of art. But for now it’s messy—and I’m learning to be okay with that.

Solitude

I don't enjoy enough solitude. I realized this recently, prompted particularly by a passage in a book I am reading. I desire solitude, but I don't get enough of it.

In reading the passage I mentioned, I understood that solitude is more than simply having a "quiet time." It is more than spending time in prayer and in God's Book. The authors write:

"Solitude is being completely alone with God away from all human contact for extended periods of time."

Like most people, I find it hard to create such time. Live is full of work that needs to be done. It is full of people who need attention. There seems to be little opportunity and space to get away and be quiet with God. But in fact we can make such time if we choose to. I fill my spare time with noise and activity and distraction, robbing myself of the time I could spend with Him. How much of our modern culture focuses on filling the emptiness around us so that we don't have time to stop, reflect on our lives and listen to Him? We have TV, iPods, internet, and a seemingly endless list of other opportunities to entertain ourselves. I am not saying that we must entirely avoid these. They can serve very useful purposes in our lives. Sometimes even just relaxing and disengaging can be a useful activity. But if you are like me, these things can come to rob my time and energy from things that are more important. It is difficult to hear from God when my attention is being demanded by a myriad of things, most of them louder and flashier than the voice of God.

In addition to all the things we fill our lives with, solitude can be difficult to find because we share our living space with other people. Not everyone has the luxury of a large house with lots of rooms to which a person can escape and be alone. Few of us have a secluded mountain cabin where we can hold our own personal retreats. I live in a home with my wife, two children and a young woman who helps us with our kids' schooling. While we are by no means crowded, personal space is not easy to come by. I also live in a reasonably large city, so when I am outside I am most often surrounded by people. Can I find solitude in such a place? I know I can, but it will require intentional effort. I think of a friend of mine who regularly spends time in an East Asian country. In that city he is surrounded by millions of people, and yet from his blog I know that even there he manages to separate himself at times from the bustle around him and create his own little place of solitude. I can do that here as well. I can get up earlier, when our house is still quiet, and try to find solitude here in the home. Or I can walk down the street to a lovely botanical garden and spend some time there. But I must be intentional if this is going to happen.

Finally, solitude requires that I set aside my agenda. Instead of using these times of solitude to take my laundry list to God, I need to intentionally set those things aside--perhaps in the first minutes of solitude--and allow him to speak to me. That is very hard for me to do--to silence my mind and heart and listen. I am much more comfortable with talking and doing than sitting and listening.

The authors of this passage remind us that Jesus used such times of solitude regularly in order to stay close to his Father and to understand what the Father wanted of him. Jesus could easily have spent his entire day, every day, doing fruitful ministry. Perhaps some modern organizations and donors would fault him for not being more productive. After all, these times of solitude are not producing demonstrable results! But in fact they are essential to maintaining long-term vitality. And if that was true for Jesus, how much more true is it for me?

I am still thinking about how to make time for solitude. I certainly would like to take time each month. Ideally I'd like to do so even more frequently. I don't want indecision to keep me from moving ahead on this and I hope that sometime in the next week I will deliberately and intentionally step away for several hours and enjoy some real solitude.

Stewards of Mystery

My reading this morning came from 1 Cor. 4:1-5. Normally I read from the New Living Translation. After reading from that version as usual this morning I felt a desire to see how other translations handled these verses, because something about the NLT's translation left me curious how much they had interpreted in the process of translating. So I went to the English Standard Version, which is not one I commonly use but to which I find myself referring with increasing frequency. What I found was that in its effort to make sense of the passage, the NLT goes farther than I would in explaining it to the reader. One verse in particular caught my attention for today. In the NLT verse 1 reads:

"So look at Apollos and me as mere servants of Christ who have been put in charge of explaining God's secrets."

But in the ESV we read:

"This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God."

I can see how the NLT translators reached their version from what I read in the ESV, but I'm uncomfortable with the way they have handled it, particularly the final phrase. According the the NLT, Paul and Apollos (and arguably, by extension, contemporary preachers or teachers) have been put in charge of explaining God's secrets. I understand that to mean that when they have done their work, those who hear them will have understanding of things they don't currently understand. But the ESV's translation strikes me in a different way. If Paul and Apollos are stewards of the mysteries of God, it could mean that they are to protect these mysteries, to care for them well, to make sure they are not diminished or harmed or lost. To steward something does not inherently mean to explain it. In fact stewardship doesn't inherently have anything to do with explanation.

I wonder if the difference has to do with our Western Protestant inclination to unpack everything theological. We are uncomfortable with mystery. We struggle to write systematic theologies that account for all of God's nature and his work and we argue over issues like human freedom and divine sovereignty because we in our human minds can't reconcile the two. It is, in that sense, a mystery. If I take the NLT's translation here my job is to try to explain that mystery--to make it understandable and acceptable to our rational minds. But if I take the ESV's translation (at least my understanding of it), our job is simply to steward that mystery--to make sure that it is not lost or distorted (such as by emphasizing one aspect at the expense of another).

My thinking on this is likely affected by my current reading of Philip Yancey's book Reaching for the Invisible God. He writes:

"Over time, I have grown more comfortable with mystery rather than certainty. God does not twist arms and never forces us into a corner with faith in himself as the only exit. We can never present the Final Proof, to ourselves or to anyone else. We will always, with Pascal, see 'too much to deny and too little to be sure...'."

I for one am much more comfortable being a steward of the mysteries of God rather than feeling that I have to explain God's secrets, most of which I don't fully understand myself.

How to Use a Tax Return

This week I ticked an annual milestone off of my to-do list. My taxes are completed and filed, thanks in no small part to the help of one acquaintance who does the hard work for me (and in the process significantly reduces my stress levels. Thanks, Don!) This year we will be getting a return, which has prompted some thinking on my part. What should I do with this returned money? I've already tithed on it, so in one sense my conscience can be clear if I use it on our own needs and desires. I do know that I will use part of it to eliminate some debt that we accumulated due to some funding shortfalls last year. But what to do with the remainder of it?

Part of me feels that I should be a wise steward and set it aside for future needs. I already can foresee several expenses coming up this year that it might be helpful to have some money set aside for, not to mention those unplanned expenses that inevitably arise. Perhaps I should even put it into a longer-term account for retirement or long-term needs. That might be what a financial manager would tell me. These may both be very legitimate choices.

Or I could use the money to buy some things that would be nice for our family, things that we don't necessarily need but which we've been dreaming of. Would it be wrong to treat ourselves to something special? Or I could simply use it for something that would be helpful, but not essential, like replacing my 4-year-old computer.

Or what if we took this money and used it for something greater, something that would serve the purposes of God's kingdom? Some friends of ours are hosting an event on Facebook called The Barnabas Offering, encouraging people to give their tax returns to people serving God cross-culturally. I think that's a great idea. I know many such people who have really struggled recently with their funding decreasing due to the economic challenges in the US and globally. Or I could give it to an organization like Compassion or World Vision and help make a difference in the lives of poor families and children around the world. I could give it to families and individuals I know personally who face real financial need (not need induced by living beyond their means.) The reality is there are so many good possibilities that it's hard to choose.

It seems clear that the choice between spending it on unnecessary items for myself or my family or investing it in God's kingdom is a clear and easy one. But what about setting it aside as a wise steward for future needs? Is that a better choice than investing it now in real needs around the world? Part of me says that the wise steward should prepare for the future and, having some surplus now, I should set it aside for the future. But does this demonstrate a lack of faith in God's ability and willingness to supply my future needs? By doing this am I saying that I'd better take care of myself because I don't know if God will do it?

The truth is I don't know what the future holds. Maybe I would put this money in the bank only to see the bank fail and my money be lost (well, there's FDIC and all that, so theoretically I wouldn't lose it) or I could invest it, but then the investment might lose value rather than gain it. It seems secure to set it aside for the future, but that security is in fact very elusive and fragile. I might invest it for my retirement only to find that I never reach that age due to Christ's return or His calling me home sooner.

As we draw near to the Lenten season, this question weighs quite strongly on my mind. What would Jesus have me do? How would he have me use this resource? While I am waiting for the IRS to process my return, I'm going to be praying about this and asking Him to direct me and give me clarity and wisdom. And I'd be glad to hear your thoughts as well.