PING!

Just finished reading a newsletter from Vision Ministries Canada. No, not for any noble purpose, but only out of self-interest - to see the small article I'd written for them in print...that does give me a warm inner glow. Along with the glow came that little "ping" when two seemingly disparate ideas collide in what goes for my brain. What better thing to do with a ping than write about it in my blog (both are four letter words after all, like love and luck and lose, among others).

Colliding idea # 1: Last night I was hanging out with some people I know - they were sharing encouragement and stories about this and that. One involved a couple who were trying to sell their house. A potential buyer's Realtor was trying to get them to lower their price by citing the poor economy to which the husband replied, "I do not belong to this economy! I belong to God's economy and that doesn't change!" The result was that the buyer accepted their price! Hmm, very interesting I thought to myself and filed it in my "back burner" folder - you know the one with all those intriguing tidbits you don't really know how to categorize and haven't really made up your mind about.

Fast forward to me reading VMC's newsletter: First the glow - ummm, nice, yes, thank you...Then, idle curiosity prompts a quick scan of the other articles (http://www.vision-ministries.org/media/NEWSLETTER_DEC.08.pdf). Oh, one challenging people to give a portion of their Christmas spending towards solving the world's clean water issue. Hmm...PING!

When the writer used the word, "opulence", I was reminded of Old Testament prophets who warned about the consequences of letting the orphans starve and disenfranchising the widows. Consequences that included loss of property, enslavement, and forced emigration. This judgment was meted out to a nation by a God who tired of the greed and injustice of those who should have known better because they had clear instructions about how to treat each other and the weak. Western civilization, based on Judeo-Christian principles, knows better. Yet most of the world's peoples barely eke out a living, often under the threat of war and the oppression of multinational corporations, while the kings of western civilization, live in relative opulence, 20% of the world's population using 80% of the world's resources. Based on the tenet, "might makes right", we even feel entitled to rape and pillage our "mother" earth in the process. How long can this inequity last without judgment? Or, if you are a materialist, how long can the earth's natural systems endure this imbalance.

If this is indeed the case, then we Westerners need to do more than think about selling our stocks and bonds or pulling back on our spending, we need to think about doing things in an entirely different way. We need to repent. To change direction. To spend our time, money and intelligence, not on the idle pleasures of the wealthy, but on finding ways to redistribute the wealth, to share the opulence, to live more modestly and generously upon the breast of the mother God created to nurture and keep us.

As I complete this blog, I realize that Margaret Atwood in "Payback" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/02/payback-margaret-atwood)
has said much the same thing, and in a far more erudite way, as I am sure, have others.