A Biblical Case for a Different Kind of Giving

As I was watching this TED talk the other day, I got to thinking about compassion and giving within Christian communities. I’ve seen many wonderful examples from individuals, groups, churches, and organizations.

When giving as a Christian, you don’t do it involuntarily or automatically, and you avoid giving out of obligation. Giving as a Christian is our response to the infinitely good gift that was given to us. You give out of love and gratitude, because you cannot help but give. It’s a form of worship.

Depending on where their passion is, Christians will give differently. Some prefer to give to their neighbors, because it’s an obvious way to watch the effects of your gift. Others have a passion for their communities and want to improve the quality of those communities. Still others prefer to give nationally and others overseas to missionaries, foundations, and more. Overseas (but non-missionary) giving is very popular with certain people and many secular groups but hasn’t hit widespread popularity among Christians.

I want to make a case for giving overseas, not necessarily for direct mission work, but for improving the health, economy, and overall quality of life in another country. Working to improve the quality of life overseas is not just a way to have an over-inflated sense of self-esteem or to avoid feeling guilty about privilege. It is a legitimate redemptive act.

The healings and miracles that Jesus performed come to mind immediately. Whether or not you agree that those occurred, you cannot deny the Bible’s portrayal of the compassion that He demonstrated toward others and the quality that he brought to others’ lives.

While His primary purpose was to redeem men from the penalty of death that comes as consequence of sin, He was not so myopic that He did not see the sufferings of man. His ministry and His healings were focused, but He still saw it a good and right thing to heal others, though His transformations usually took place on a physical and a spiritual level.

As Christians are to be imitators of Christ, out of gratitude and a desire to be like the One who has given us so much, we are here to participate in redemptive acts, both big and small. I would argue that improving health and conditions for others in other countries would not only affect us individually and nationally because of the butterfly effect, but that it’s also included in our calling. It’s not feel-good philanthropy or a solution to guilt, but rather a genuine desire to have a small response of gratitude to the gifts that were given to us.

Making Peace with Texting

Tags

society, technology

I remember distinctly how excited I was to get texting on my cell phone, as a reward for good grades. I had 200 texts allowed for both incoming and outgoing, and for the most part, I watched them diligently. With so few texts allowed and without Facebook or email (actually, that was in the time of MySpace), most of my communication took place over the telephone.

I confess that now, I’ve abused texting as much as anyone else. I’ve texted in class, texted while driving (not to worry, it’s not often), texted at parties, texted during important conversations. Who would have thought it would be considered normal behavior, though perhaps not healthy, to pick up a piece of plastic every few minutes?

Finally, I started to get angry whenever my phone would buzz, because it meant that someone, however trivial or important, demanded immediate attention from me. My life no longer revolved around fulfilling my duties; instead, I had let the evil demon sneak in and take hold of me.

I started to turn it on silent, leave it somewhere, so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at it, and ignore the phone, no matter who was trying to get ahold of me. Of course, that backfired, too. In my attempt to not let my phone control me, I had unwittingly let it take over again.

All of the sudden, I realized how little texting had ever done for me. It had given this weight and importance to transient relationships, where I would communicate more with people who I would probably not speak to in a year, much less remember. In fact, there’s quite a few people on my iPhone contact list whose names draw a blank.

In being irritated with the demands of those who wouldn’t have a place of importance in my life, I threw out my communication with those who were important. If a good friend needed to contact me, I had made that impossible at certain times by ignoring my phone for hours. What else was I to do?

Texting had eroded my good relationships, to the point where I could send a casual, but meaningless text in an attempt to maintain an ongoing conversation or to promote a sense of intimacy. In reality, I wasn’t putting any real or substantial effort forth.

I’ve started a new thing now, since I cannot rid myself of texting entirely. I’d be shutting out nearly every person who communicates with me and making it an inconvenience for both of us. What I have been doing, is responding to the more important texts more regularly and ignoring the ones that can wait. It’s the only way that I can seem to balance and regulate the demands that come at every hour of the day and night.

I cannot shut texting out of my life entirely, because that’s the primary method of communication for most people under 30 (and many over). Instead, I just have to make peace with texting, without allowing it to rule. When there are times when I need silence and four walls, it’s okay for me to say “no” to the phone. The world can wait.

For more on texting, read “The Flight from Conversation“.

How has texting affected your life? Has it improved your communication? Has it helped or hurt your relationships with others?

Yesterday I Went to Juárez-A Guest Post by Lyn McKinley

Six years ago, this simple statement would not have drawn even a second notice when uttered among residents of El Paso, Texas. At that time, a trip to Juarez was de rigueur for everyone from adventuresome visiting relatives from the Midwest to senior citizens buying prescriptions and expensive tequila cheap to underage local teenagers looking for anything in a shot glass.

Yet when I mentioned this trip to a friend afterward, the look on his face was a mixture of disbelief and shock. “I won’t go any more,” he told me matter of factly. “You couldn’t pay me enough to go,” he said, as if there were an adequate sum for risking your life. From 2006-2011, an estimated 38,000 people have been killed in Mexico, primarily in drug-related incidents. As the gateway to lucrative U.S. drug markets, Ciudad Juárez has seen more than 6,500 deaths since 2008. The numbers are likely higher, since many deaths go unreported due to intimidation by both criminals and police.

I’m not particularly adventuresome or heroic. I was simply tagging along with a young missionary couple who are heroic. They work in a small community on the outskirts of Juárez, whose residents battle poverty in all its forms amid a nagging wind, which often gusts into gales of blowing sand. This is a desert no man’s land. One-room stucco houses, often painted in pinks and golds, dot the barren landscape. Some live in worn wooden shacks where open air makes its own 2 x 4s.

We ate a feast of chicken fried in a cast-iron barbeque dish set over an open fire, with sliced potatoes and rice prepared Mexican-style with tomatoes and onions. One of the missionaries’ daughters turned 3 the next day, so we brought a large chocolate birthday cake with us for the celebration. Her name is Eden.

I have lived in El Paso since 2005 and spent six months in Mexico learning Spanish in the mid 1990s. While this fiercely patriotic country is overwhelmed in every way by often gruesome murders, I have never met anyone but generous, authentic, loving people during my time in Mexico’s interior and along its borders. It is her government that abandons her.

After the sense of community I felt during our visit, a change came over me when I saw the 10-foot high border fence from the inside. As the car sped along a road that parallels the fence, which snakes its way between the two cities, I glanced through the chain links at the early evening lights of El Paso. How striking it is to look out at a border city through a fence rather than obscured from it behind a wall. I was blindsided to see El Paso so close (right along the border) and yet so far away. I felt like it was me they were afraid of.

I don’t share Robert Frost’s observations about fences making good neighbors, though I couldn’t get the poet’s line out of my mind when I returned home. I plan many more trips to Juárez with my missionary friends, despite what others say. I hope the fence never changes me.

Always Self-Discovery Through Paper

When I was little, I made terrible messes, and I had a paper issue. “Important” pieces of paper were scattered all over the room, and my dad, in an effort to stop the madness, insisted that I keep all of my important papers in a memorabilia box. Anything that didn’t fit in the box had to go.

All this time, I’ve kept a memorabilia box full of letters, papers, journals, tickets, notes…all pieces of paper that have had significance to me at some point. Tonight I was digging through it looking for an old note, and I found much more than I had expected.

Any important piece of paper that I’ve had has been thrown away at some point. I’m not sure why; I must have had a good reason for doing so then. Maybe I thought that various notes and letters were too important to me and that I had to throw them away so that I would never have to share them.

I also discovered a plethora of letters from friends, written on carefully chosen cards. They came here and there, but I never realized how many I had until now. Something about a well-chosen card with a sweet note is more meaningful than any present. I don’t think that registered with me then.

After I kept finding these cards, I realized how few I probably replied to. It doesn’t mean I cared any less, but it certainly looked that way. I think that now I have a lot of letters to write.

In a daring moment, I decided to open my freshman year journal. That’s one that I’ve always shied away from, thinking it too emotional or embarrassing to read. Well, it was that, but it showed me so much more that I could have thought possible. Maybe I’m wholly detached from that world, since I’m living in a different location and have few, if any connections left to that time.

While I may have been completely without inhibitions at the time, I was more confused that I have ever been in my life, with absolutely no clue about what my future held. In college, you specialize a bit and start to get ideas about life, but when you start out as a freshman, your whole life is ahead of you, replete with character-defining, challenging moments.

I don’t feel particularly envious of that time anymore. I’d rather carry around the stressors and decisions I’ve made, good and bad, then go back to a time where I had the raw power to build or destroy my world without any forewarning.

While I won’t share with you quotes from my journal, (which I’m seriously considering throwing away, too), I’ll give you a couple of my quotes that I found in it:

“Evil may be endured when our days pass
in mourning, heavy-hearted, hard beset,
if only sleep reigns over nighttime, blanketing
the world’s good and evil from our eyes.
But not for me: dreams too my demon sends me.
-Homer, The Odyssey, Book 20, Lines 100-105

“I can be a princess even if I am in rags and tatters. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in a cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.” –Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Little Princess

Crumbling Rigidity

I have a loose form of legalism, a sort of rigidity in my morality that isn’t working. What I struggle with, and what I think many struggle with, Christian or no, is turning principles into solid laws. The problem is that principles and truths are more pliable that we would like them to be. They are ever the same, yet always in flux.

It’s a kind of freedom I don’t feel capable of handling. Sometimes I think that I’d rather be stifled in exchange for knowing the answer. Many might think it’s a blessing to think through things and to push for truth, but it’s a kind of curse, too. Emily Dickinson said:

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world—you must have noticed them in the street, —how do they live? How do they get the strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

I cannot live like an automaton, but I can hardly find the time to do what I need to do because my mind is spent with thoughts.

I fell into a dangerous trap that Josh Harris labels “reducing to one practice”. When you fall into that pattern of thinking, it’s easy to incorporate a feeling of righteousness into everyday activities. This goes beyond eating or drinking to the glory of God and turns into piety.

“If we elevate a single practice and invest it with the authority of biblical principle, we can place a rule or burden on people that isn’t actually commanded in God’s Word.”

This can happen with any belief system or moral framework; it’s not limited to Christianity. If I believe that loyalty, something most of us believe is good and true, and categorize each of my actions toward a friend as loyal or disloyal, I’m participating in this single practice.

While none of my actions are legitimately neutral, (if we’re thinking in terms of a moral world that it set up like binary), I can still inadvertently shove “always listening to a friend in a time of need” as a loyal action, turning it from a principle into a rule.

Then, in my static view of the world, if I am faced with an instance where it would be more loyal to not listen and then not enable, I have made it difficult to reconcile my actions to my sense of morality.

When I am not dynamic and critical in my thoughts, I cannot do right or good for very long. If I view love as something that always tries and pushes and works persistently, then how can I comprehend knowing when it turns into groveling that only serves to feed another’s ego?

Any principle of ethics or morality ceases to be such when I reduce it to one practice and hold it there in the iron grip of my mind.

P.S. I want to give credit to my friend Karen, as our conversation the other day instilled these thoughts in my mind, and I want to give credit to my friend Timothy at the Creative Juicer for helping me with the title.