As I was writing that earlier post on Apple's new MacBook, drooling over a product I want but absolutely do not need, I got a timely dose of reality. My Twitterific updated itself and showed me a long series of tweets from the folks at Blog Action Day, who were announcing progress on this today's annual blogfest for social justice. (Twitter--yet another tool for holy conviction.)
The topic of this year's Blog Action Day is poverty. Bloggers, podcasters, and videocasters around the world--11,000 strong and counting--are approaching the subject in myriad ways, and the B.A.D. site
offers 88 ways (some ways more well advised than others) to be the change for poverty's sake.
I never knew poverty as a child, but only because of the care of local churches that surrounded my family in each place we lived. For reasons I won't go into here, we moved constantly until I was 13, and could barely afford any of the places we lived--and some years, only had a place to live because of the kindness of friends or strangers. I remember bags of groceries showing up at our door, timely envelopes with cash delivered just as the pantry went dry. I don't think I ever missed a meal, because the people around us took seriously
the biblical injunction to care for those in need.
Poverty is an issue that is so astoundingly complex in causes and solutions, and so broad and unknowable in terms of scope, that those of us who haven't devoted our lives to the cause usually think and act very little for poverty's sake. But for Christians, thinking about poverty, praying for the poor, and reshaping our lives for service to the poor should
be basic, elemental, natural parts of our witness.
Tom Davis, the president of the orphan care organization Children's Hope Chest, recently wrote
a quick list of ways to care for the needy (accompanied by a gauntlet-throwing essay,
"Why Christians Suck," about how so few of us do these things). As Tom admonishes us to remember, actions on behalf of the poor shouldn't be something we have to rally ourselves to perform; they should be the very reflexes of our faith.
This is pretty remarkable--you'd think that Max Lucado, of all pastors, would offer an encouraging word, delivered with a smile, about the economic woes facing people today. But instead, he delivers nothing short of a lamentation. The message, essentially, is that God has always promised economic woes, and we've always been foolish to believe anything else. Check it out:
You Have Our Attention, Lord
A prayer by Max Lucado - written in October 2008
Our friends lost their house
The co-worker lost her job
The couple next door lost their retirement
It seems that everyone is losing their footing
This scares us. This bailout with billions.
These rumblings of depression.
These headlines: ominous, thunderous-
"Going Broke!" "Going Down!" "Going Under!" "What Next?"
What is next?
We're listening. And we're admitting: You were right.
You told us this would happen.
You shot straight about loving stuff and worshipping money.
Greed will break your heart, you warned.
Money will love you and leave you.
Don't put your hope in riches that are so uncertain.
You were right. Money is a fickle lover and we just got dumped.
We were wrong to spend what we didn't have,
Wrong to neglect prayer and ignore the poor,
Wrong to think we ever earned a dime. We didn't. You gave it. And now, tell us Father, are you taking it?
We're listening. And we're praying.
Could you make something good out of this mess?
Of course you can. You always have.
You led slaves out of slavery,
Built temples out of ruins,
Turned stormy waves into a glassy pond and water into sweet wine.
This disorder awaits your order. So do we.
Categories: money,
prayer
Sometimes the timing of these things is uncanny. I spent part of the weekend with my stomach in knots and my head in fits over the news about the economy. The macro-level questions about the near future of our national and global markets are just staggering to consider (I've found
Jim Manzi particularly helpful in sorting all this out), and all of that is a diversion away from the balance sheet in our own homes. Tough, mysterious, confusing, and not a little bit scary.
So here's the prayer for the week from the Book of Common Prayer. I find it at once comforting, honest, and challenging---it offers comfort through the act of trust, honesty through its admission that we exist in a context of temporality and materiality, and a challenge to choose deep within ourselves to hold fast only to what lasts:
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon