You can get your ketchup bottles made custom these days. Did
you know? Anyone with a couple extra bucks can just have their own name designed
right into the label on a Heinz ketchup bottle. This is a thing. Because we
deserve it, right? Don’t we hard-working North Americans deserve to have our ketchup personalized?
I read this morning about a new beauty technique that
involves a $2,000 procedure for removing blood from your body and injecting it
into your face. Apparently, it’s a rage with the Kardashians and, no doubt,
young women everywhere will follow suit since it allegedly makes you look
younger. Hide your age. Save your pennies.
At the superstore this morning, I picked up an assortment of
color-coded insulated faux-mason jar drinking glasses for my kids. At $5 a
piece, they weren’t exactly an extravagant splurge but I find myself wondering
if there was a better universal use for that $20. Could it have bought a meal
for someone? Diapers for a struggling single parent? Added to the funds from
other unnecessary purchases to contribute to bringing clean drinking water or medical
help to the masses of people on this planet dying daily from contaminated water
and malnutrition-related illness?
Yes. Of course it could have. But I liked those cups and the
money was mine and no matter what I do in this life, I will probably always
have a warm-enough home with a cupboard full of more drinking glasses than
people to drink from them. What’s wrong with that?
I glance around and my heart calculates the sum total of all
the excess I can see from where I’m sitting. A man rides by on an $800 bike,
passed by a $30,000 car. I take a swig from my $4 bottle of vitamin-infused fancy
juice in its plastic bottle and make notes with my $3 pen in the university library
my $10,000 a year tuition helps fund. If it rains, I will open my $22 umbrella
and try not to get my $18 flats wet, which would be a real tragedy since I only
have about sixteen pairs of shoes in my closet.
Somewhere it all gets dizzying and I become nauseated.
It’s easy to think that what I have or don't have, what I do
or don’t do doesn’t matter that much. But it matters.
It matters because the sad truth is that there are more than
enough resources to go around in this world. More than enough dollars and
farmland to feed the hungry. More than enough words for everyone to be
encouraged and more than enough of us calling ourselves disciples to overcome
the poverty of love that exists all around us. We hoard the manna and it spoils
in our homes, in our bellies, in our pantries and bank accounts and vacation
homes. We are afflicted by the disease that comes from overabundance but to
cure it, we hoard some more and thank Him for His blessing.
It overwhelms me, the abundance of God’s manna and the way
it can still feel daily like we never have enough to go around. I never know
how much is too much, whether giving up air conditioning matters while my
family still pays $200 a month for cell phone access, and if having a hundred
bucks in the bank is responsible stewardship or if it’s hoarding riches so I
avoid the question altogether and buy a Blu-Ray player because, well c’mon, we need one, right?
As my heart cries for ministry again, I try to imagine how
it is we justify this lifestyle when we’ve all been told to abandon it. Yes, Jesus, we whisper in our
stone-walled churches with the patterned carpet and the cappuccino ministry. I give it all to you.
There are days I think seven articles of clothing ought to
be enough to live on, that a room with a bed and a loaf of bread is all I
should strive to keep ahold of in this life. There are days I think, “sell all
you have and give it to the poor” actually means sell all you have and give it to the poor and isn’t just a metaphor
for discipleship, that “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations”
isn’t an invitation for a posh holy land tour but a command to get our knees
bloody, to fill our mouths with the taste of the poverty which can only be quenched
by mercy.
I went back to college so I could someday teach at a university
and have a retirement account and health benefits but lately, its feeling an
awful lot like the pursuit of comfort above all things and I’m pretty confident
that the kind of comfort I need is not the kind that gathers zeroes in an IRA. I’m
not sure if “get wisdom” means the kind I can memorize out of textbooks or the
kind that can only be learned in the hard doing of following His footsteps.
The truth is, I’d like to balance the life I want, the life
I secretly believe somewhere deep down that I deserve with the commands of giving and serving. I’d like to do
what makes me happy and believe that things like sex trafficking and gendercide
are God’s business, that there’s nothing I can do about them but maybe cut a
check every once in a while because God has been good to me. But I feel myself
believing the lie… it’s okay to be comfortable while other people suffer. It’s
okay to worship in fancy churches and learn at fancy schools and talk about how
people suffer while I wrinkle my forehead and purse my lips because how sad. It's okay to buy a latte and
another new candle and do the kind of work that people do when they’re pursuing
their own comfort because that's what this country is all about. That's what this
life is all about.
I’ve believed the lie that my happiness, my comfort, is more
important than obedience. I’ve believed that I can have a foot in both worlds—that
I can sponsor a child or two and hand the homeless guy a burrito and I’ve done
my duty. But I hold my wallet close. My children and my cell phone and my
apartment with a thermostat that works, because I don’t really want to give it
all to Jesus. I don’t really want to lay down and die, even if that’s precisely
what I signed up for when I asked Him to make me His.
The honest truth is that I know all of it. I know it and I
believe I’m off track. I make small changes and buy fair trade coffee and
sponsor a kid and think I’m doing something good in the world but all the while
I’m smothered by the abundance we’re all neck deep in around here. I don’t know
how to live in this world but not be of it.
I don’t know but I’m willing to learn and I’m going to
continue asking for brokenness until I abandon the idea that I can balance the
American dream with the commands of Christ, because I suspect that there really
is no balance. There are only personalized ketchup bottles and luxury cars and
children in Africa being suffocated by their own tumors for lack of medical
care. There are only cheeseburgers and sale racks and girl babies buried alive
because they should have been born as males. There are only plastic bottles
filled with designer water that I can swig and gulp from all I want but not
without the image of the thousands dying every day without clean water access,
of the bottles that linger in the earth longer than the bones of the babies who
died without it.
And I pray the prayer I’ve been afraid to pray all along.
The prayer that I would mean it. The prayer that trades work for water bottles
and just enough for far too much.
Amen.
