This year….how many times have I started a sentence with that phrase lately?….This year we have seen a lot of how the world really is. So many people in the places we all come from have been saying things along the lines of ‘It’s time to face reality, get a real job, contribute to society, etc.’ Fact is, I’ve been back to ‘Reality’ for a couple months, I’ve seen the comparison back to back, both ways, and this, out here, away from North America, this is reality. 60% of the world lives on less than $1 a day. None of them have spare bedrooms to use as an office or a guest room that the in laws stay in for a week of the year. They don’t have separate rooms for each of their kids. They don’t have living rooms to entertain guests in. If they’re lucky, there’s A room. Period. With a family of 5, 10, 15 or more. There aren’t 3 car, 2 car, or single car garages. In reality people walk the majority of their travels. There’s no private front lawn where the kids play. They don’t burn 100 barrels of oil per person a year in heating, driving, and eating – at most they burn 1. And the suicide, anxiety, and depression rates are like a thousand percent lower, by the way. People don’t get out of their car and punch their way into someone else’s because they got cut off in traffic like the road is their rightful property. Most places you wouldn’t want to claim ownership of the road in the state it’s in anyway.
This isn’t because things are better outside western civilization. It’s not because people are smarter. It’s because they aren’t blinded by the extreme wealth that leaves them with nothing more to do than find things wrong with their day to try and sue someone else over. They’re fully aware of the fact that the world is burning down around them and as such are doing what they can to last just one more day. That’s reality. We in the Western world are blind to it because our wealth has not only insulated us from it, but is the cause of it. Our wealth is built on the backs of entire nations in this age of outsourced slavery and we vacation where people have to sell their dignity to us to feed their family. Even the poorest 20% of Canadians, with an average income of only $4000 a year, make more than 10 times what the majority of the world makes, and it’s all made possible by the state we keep the rest of the world in through our destabilizing wars, politics, and trade deals.
So this year this squad, through all the thousands of stories, has seen reality. We’ve seen what it takes to face that reality and come through truly alive. It’s not more hours or a better position at work. It’s not making enough for early retirement, a sail boat, a house, a wife and kids, a regular paycheck, or any other thing that we view as success in the west. It’s not even more free time, which we all seem to be striving after with all these other things. We’ve seen that the majority of the world has never even dreamed such things, and that in some places they live with far more purpose and joy than we’ve ever seen or known at home. In those places what the people do differently is this: they set everything else aside in order to love first and do later. Despite having nothing, to them the greater crime than them starving is their neighbor starving. What little they have they share. And most importantly, they seek God together.
So instead of griping about how a church program that feeds homeless people in a park once a week is lowering your property value by ‘attracting’ unwanted people (to which I say they wouldn’t be sleeping on your doorstep if you let them sleep on your couch), you seek the person living right outside your door, next door, next cubicle, across the world, wherever, and get to know them. Help if you can, but firstly just get to know the person behind the stereotype you project on them or the assumptions you’ve made about them. Do what we were commanded to do – love as Jesus loved.
That’s the real job, the hardest thing to do in life. Love as Jesus loved, unconditionally, to the point where, when called, we will even take on poverty ourselves just as he did and trust God to supply our daily needs for nothing more than to have enough time to pour out as much love as we are given. To follow this calling some will take low paying jobs to go to the place they are called. Some will take high paying positions to meet their call of being Jesus in the corporate world. And some give away all they own and move to the middle of a different country with only the clothes on their back to seek the community God has laid on their hearts. Whatever it is, we don’t forget that the reality is it all comes from God and that the measures of success we’ve been taught are no measures at all. This is the reality Jesus knew, preached, and lived. He showed that money matters not compared to doing the work of the Lord because if there’s a tax to be paid it will be provided, even if you find it in the mouth of a fish. He didn’t have a place to lay his head or an income to eat with, but when needed the birds brought him food and people invited Him into their homes. What He did was simply the work He saw the Father doing, and calls each of us to do the same, wherever that leads us. We must trust, each step of the way, that as the birds have food and the flowers in the field are clothed, so much more important are we to our Father.
We world racers can go back to where we’re from and get the best possible job in order to ‘face reality’ which dictates that we need a predictable paycheck of roughly the same amount every two weeks. Or we can remember what reality here on earth really looks like, do the work of our Father wherever that takes us, and have a reliable paycheck of exactly what we need when we need it.
After a year like this, predictable isn’t in our vocabulary anymore
