The book had a lot of convicting things to say about how Western Christians practice their faith in view of the rest of the world. We came away from the book with the feeling that we as a group needed to do something beyond just sitting at a table talking about the world’s problems.

One topic discussed pretty extensively in the book is called microfinance. I had never heard of it before reading the book, but the basic concept is this: By donating money, we may be able to feed a hungry person in a third-world country, but we will do very little to pull him out of poverty—which is the root problem of hunger. And sometimes our donations can actually work against us, perpetuating his poverty by making him dependent on the donations like a deer at a park who no longer knows how to feed itself.

Microfinance, on the other hand, involves giving small low-interest loans (usually less than $1000) to help someone start a business. This money is then repaid over the course of six months to a year, at which point it can be reinvested toward another entrepreneur. So now the money has been used to provide a source of income for someone, and even a source of jobs for the community if the business does well enough, as many have. And after the loan is repaid, we can use the same money over and over again to give that opportunity to others.

Of all the concepts in the book, microfinance is the one that resonated with us the most. We got a group account at Kiva, a very well-run microfinance organization, then pooled our money and started lending. We made our first loan to a grocery store in Uganda that requested some capital to purchase more produce and mineral water. So far they’ve paid back 75% of the loan amount and are right on schedule to pay back the rest.

But we still felt like we needed to do more. Just as it is a danger to focus only on your immediate surroundings and ignore global issues, it’s also a danger to focus on the rest of the world to the exclusion of your neighbor. How can we help Des Moines?

I concluded by pushing for a return to a more communal mindset, describing a vision of a neighborhood where neighbors actually talk to each other and aren’t afraid to ask for help when it’s needed—and a call for Christians to be the initiators in this, to be the ones to ask to borrow tools instead of making a trip to Lowe’s every time they need something they don’t have, and to freely offer of their resources to others.

Great, right? At least that’s how I envisioned it in my head. But I never posted it. The words didn’t fit together, the tone was all off, and I just wasn’t able to say what I wanted to say. I regularly spend three or four hours a week writing and fine-tuning the things I post here, but after about five hours with that one I still had nothing. So “Interdependence Day” just sat in a notebook for awhile as July 4, 2009 came and went, and with it my opportunity for a timely play on words.

About a month ago we had new neighbors move in next door: a mom and dad in their 30s, their two kids ages five and six, and the kids’ grandparents, every one of them very outgoing and friendly. Especially the kids, and especially the six-year-old.

Every time he sees me outside, he asks if he can come over and help me with whatever I’m doing. (Can I bring my skateboard over, too?)

If I’m not outside, he’ll knock on my door to ask me for help with something trivial, like cutting up and peeling an apple. (I can’t eat the peel because I have a loose tooth and it might fall out.)

He saw that I was grilling shish kebabs the other day and he asked me for the recipe. (Oh, and can we borrow those metal sticks too? I don’t think we have any of those.)

In short, he’s making me be my ideal interdependent neighbor. He’s forcing my generosity, and the worst part is that my first reaction is often reluctance rather than the limitless charity I want to be known for. I’m sure his parents have skewers for grilling, but why did I tell him that instead of just saying they could borrow them any time they wanted?

So I’m learning. In retrospect, I think that’s why I wasn’t able to get the words out last year: I didn’t have any experience to back up my grand calls for reform. Maybe next year I’ll have something to say. In the mean time, the kid already invited us over to dinner. I need to step up my game.

So a few weeks ago I got a job at Webspec Design, a small web design company here in Des Moines. I’ve really enjoyed it the past few weeks, and I’ve learned an unbelievable amount of stuff even though I’ve been making web sites since I was 12. Particularly, I work with WordPress most of the day, and the longer I get to make these cool sites at work, the more I want to redesign mine. So expect a facelift here in the next couple of months when I have time.

For now, I added the feature to subscribe to comments by email. A couple of people had asked for this due to some of the discussions on the last few posts. If you leave a comment, you can check a box to be notified of all subsequent comments to that post. (Unfortunately, it only works if you actually leave a comment, so if you want to follow a discussion then you have to contribute as well!)

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

There are many who are so obviously my neighbor—the misfortunate, the poor, the sick—that I am quick to love them, or at least to want to love them, meanwhile forgetting that this command has another imperative, which is to love each of them as myself. This is one of those occasions where I assume I understand something Jesus said and then don’t give it a second thought.

But it doesn’t mean “treat others the way you would want to be treated.” That’s much too simple when dealing in the subject of love, and Jesus already said it someplace else.

No, it means “treat others the way you treat yourself”. The difference is great. I would be grateful if someone gave me something to eat when I was hungry, so out of empathy I will give food to a food drive. But I will give of my excess, and I don’t have excess of my favorite foods. I will only ever have just enough or not enough of the things I like; I only have too much of what I don’t like.

But is it really loving in the same way as I love myself if I donate my canned beets and sauerkraut, which I hate? Or even that salsa that I bought two jars of because it was on sale, but didn’t end up liking very much? (Is it loving in the same way as I love myself if I carry McDonald’s gift certificates to give to homeless people if they ask for money, even though I myself wouldn’t eat at a McDonald’s?)

I had the opportunity to experience the other side of this the day I volunteered at Hope Ministries last year. They told us in advance that they wanted our group to bring ten cans of soup and ten bottles of water to hand out to the people in the homeless camps by the river—but then at lunchtime they surprised us by making us eat what we had brought instead of the food from the soup kitchen like we planned. I was very surprised as some of the people refused outright, choosing to go hungry rather than eat the food they had brought to donate because it wasn’t good enough.

But isn’t it better to give something than to give nothing? No. The food pantries of the world already have enough canned corn and Hormel chili. What’s important is that my heart is in the right place for service, and if I can’t give my best to the least—if I can’t love them in the same way as I love myself—then I shouldn’t give at all.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan to the Jewish scholar to show that your neighbor meant anyone he was able to show love to. But just like the closed-minded Jew, I lack imagination in understanding who could be my neighbor.

To most Americans of our day, Jesus might have told a parable about the Good Iraqi, who helped a wounded soldier at cost to himself even though his brother had just the week before been killed by stray shrapnel from a round of American freedom-bombing. Just the sort of story that could get Jesus assassinated.

If He was telling the story to me, though—to someone who thought he had a pretty good grasp of what everyone means—it might go something like this:

Two young adults graduated from college and landed good entry-level jobs in their field of study. Finding themselves with more discretionary income than they knew how to spend, and resolving to plant their feet solidly in the middle class, they each bought a house. Now both of them were handy and decided to fix up the houses on their own.

The first went to remodel his bathroom and found that the previous owners had done a very poor job of painting in corners that were out of plain view. Cheap new tile had also been laid to cover up a mildew problem. In the coming weeks he found many other cases like this where the owners had covered up something in haste to make the house appear better than it was.

The second, meanwhile, finishing the basement, found that his house’s electrical wiring had been updated recently, and in doing so, the last owners had made it very easy for him to wire the basement into the main electrical system. In fact, behind every wall he tore down and inside every light fixture he removed, in every part of the house that had been updated, he found that they had taken great care to do everything even above and beyond the minimum requirements of the residential building code.

Now, I ask you: Which of the previous homeowners was a neighbor to the new homeowner?

“What’s mine is mine” – for now, yes, but it won’t always be that way. This is reason enough to respect all kinds of property.

Who then is my neighbor? Anyone who can be affected by my actions, even if I will never meet him or even know his name.

So this past weekend at the Plaza in Kansas City, I was sitting on a bench with my friend Kyle when two people in their early twenties came up to us carrying a stack of literature. It amused me afterward that my first thought was to wonder what movie they were promoting. It turns out they were just evangelizing.

If you could call it that. Reading from a Chick tract, they explained to us the emptiness of worldly pursuits such as backbiting and whoremongering. After that, one of them asked if we drank alcohol. We answered factually that we did. He then asked if he could pray for us about that. Kyle said No. I don’t want you to pray for me because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m Kyle. What’s your name?

And so we talked. We talked for about ten minutes. Jake told us he was a brand-new intern at a local missions organization who had left everything behind in Indiana when he recognized that the environment in his hometown was restricting his growth as a Christian. He also learned that Kyle and I were Christians and not in any way alcoholics. He ended up praying that God would give us signs and visions and went on his way.

The word evangelize comes from the Greek word euangelizo, which means “to bring good news”, and Jesus’ good news was always “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near” (see Mark 1:14-15). It had little to do with saving us for the sake of freedom from sin, and much to do with preparing our hearts for the inevitable arrival of Jesus’ future kingdom.

But here I am using rhetoric to excuse my inaction, as I often do. I can pick apart their methodology all I want, but they were spending their Friday evening in faithfulness to God. I, on the other hand, didn’t proclaim the good news to anyone.

If I doubted my faith, it wouldn’t be due to scientific evidence or philosophical reasoning. The most compelling arguments against my faith are the practical ones, the arguments based on things that can be observed rather than those that can be reasoned.

Christianity is a last resort for desperate people. Most high-profile conversions, like Brian Welch from Korn a few years ago, are due to a person reaching the end of his rope. Alcoholics Anonymous uses a belief in God as a starting point for overcoming an addiction. And many who are terminally ill will turn to religion for the few months they have left. People use the idea of God as a psychological crutch because they are weak and they need something to help them cope with the darker side of life.

Christianity is not rational. It is an unnecessary cure for a fabricated disease. Sin can easily be explained in purely natural terms as our survival instinct. Animals are greedy, promiscuous and even murderous, and we don’t call it sin. We don’t really need to be “saved” from anything – we just need to abandon the concept of sin and quit feeling bad about what we do.

The Bible isn’t very distinctive from a literary standpoint. In the Old Testament, the poetry is often dull, the prophecies incoherent, and the narrative awkward. Parts of it are wonderful, but maybe 75% of it is skippable. If God wrote a book, couldn’t he have done a better job?

The Christian view of the world is too narrow. Christians set up camp on a hill overlooking a valley; the intellectual elite—scholars, leaders and artists—are always climbing higher up the mountain, and from that vantage point they can see that there is much more to the world than that valley. To them, the Christian worldview is something to be passed through, not stopped at. In other words: those who are inside the box of religion are afraid to go outside, but those who make it outside never want to go back in.

How do I answer these objections? The poem in Philippians 2 is the key to everything:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
    taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

If our faith isn’t always rational, consider that it wasn’t rational for the Creator of the universe to die for his creations.

If our faith is especially attractive to the lowly and weak, consider that when the God of the universe became a baby, he could not even hold his head up on his own.

If the Bible is not distinctive, consider that Jesus was born to poor parents in a filthy stable in an unimportant town in an oppressed nation.

If our faith is not taken seriously by the rich, the powerful, and the intellectuals, consider that Jesus’ birth was announced only to a group of shepherds.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
    ”I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
    AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.”

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The word kenosis comes from the Greek word for “emptiness”, and it refers to the idea that Jesus emptied himself of his divine glory and dignity in order to be incarnated as a human. He gave it all up so that he could become what he wanted to save. Even apart from his words and actions, the very nature of Jesus Christ’s incarnation shows us how we should conduct ourselves as Christians.

We follow a foolish faith. We are fools for believing it. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise! His wisdom is above all others, but it is not merely an enhanced version of our own; it is altogether different.

And God, in his wisdom, engineered a world in which faith and trust are valued above all else. He will never allow his existence to be proven; he’s given enough evidence to satisfy those who already believe, but not enough to convince those that do not, so that it is impossible to reach him without faith.

If you require proof in order to believe, you will never find it, but if you believe first, you will find that you have all the proof you need. And this is foolishness.

Despite its age, it holds a battery charge for a week, and gets reception in places you wouldn’t believe. It has been dropped a few times, but you couldn’t tell from looking at it. It has never caused her a problem.

Meanwhile, Joel is on his third RAZR in six months. Look at how far cellular technology has progressed in the last few years: We now have hand-held phones that play music, take pictures, and fall apart if you shake them too hard.

How quickly we abandon quality for convenience. It’s not hard to see in our culture. Even though the food at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is a nutritional nightmare, it’s fast and cheap; low-quality and overpriced digital downloads have replaced the crystal clarity of CD audio; wireless technology is dominant, even though it is unreliable and slow compared to wired alternatives.

It has permeated every aspect of our culture – technology, environmentalism, art, relationships, and perhaps more inconspicuously, religion.

Because when it comes down to it, Jesus is inconvenient. He is impractical. He always seems to get in the way of my affairs, reminding me that the harder road is usually the right one, or telling me that I am not worthy of Him if I love anything else more than Him.

Jesus is inconvenient, and so those who do not have Him do not want Him, and those of us who do have Him are usually guilty (to varying extents) of trading the real Jesus for an innocuous, manufactured version of Himself. We do this by taking certain of His sayings seriously while ignoring others that do not fit into our already-established lifestyle. Make him white; make him handsome; make him political; make him tolerant. This plastic jesus is convenient because he agrees with us, but he is fragile and easily broken.

But the thing about Jesus – the inconvenient, real Jesus – is that He is forgiving. No matter how many times I exchange the truth of God for the lie that I can find happiness in anything but Christ, I am still His missing son. He lovingly awaits my return, and when I do find my way back into His arms, He throws a celebration party.

This is the Jesus I will always come back to.

At the last Grab a Brew, someone asked a question: “Would you rather be right with no evidence to back you up, or wrong, but with good evidence for it?”

I had never heard or considered this question before. My own answer was immediately obvious, but as he continued, it became clear that this is not only another area in which our beliefs differ, but that it is actually the source of our differences. It is the question at the root of all other questions.

I did some research the next day to get some background information. I found that the idea was first proposed in 1877 by William Kingdon Clifford in his essay called “The Ethics of Belief”, and came to be called Clifford’s Principle. Quoting Clifford:

The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him. … It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

In his essay, Clifford argues that it is morally wrong for someone to believe in something he cannot prove, regardless of the outcome. In a purely rationalistic worldview, it is true that we can only make progress if we build on a foundation of that which can be proven. It follows that if I believe something that I can’t prove is worth believing, then it is not worth believing. This is why Grab a Brew always comes back to the same three topics. We believe a lot of unverifiable things about the universe and the nature of reality. They see this as a moral travesty.

But what is truth? Is it that which can be proven, or is it that which corresponds to reality? This is our disagreement, and in the end, it reduces down to the question of whether or not God exists. If he doesn’t, the universe must be purely rational, and truth can only be that which is proven. However, if God does exist, who is to say truth is rational?

How much is truth worth? If a man says, “I’ll only look for my lost object in the well-lit corners of the house”, and further still, “If my lost object is not in the well-lit corners of the house, then I don’t want to find it!”, it’s clear that he does not place much value on the lost object. But when he determines to find what is lost, even if it means tearing apart the house panel by panel—then we can be assured that he values the lost object more than anything.

This one was originally posted February 10, 2007.

I have been working retail for the past four years, putting myself through school and gaining valuable insights into the human nature. From day one at Hy-Vee back in 2003, all the way to Target in 2007, it has been for me nothing more than a means to an end. I needed a job to help out with college expenses, and they needed a faithful worker that they could underpay, and that was the extent of our relationship.

I knew from the start that I could never actually make a career of it. It was just a feeling I got when I thought about myself in ten years, still putting cans on shelves and showing customers where the macaroni is. But I never really understood why.

Last week I brought my 1910 hardcover copy of Pensées to work so I could read it during my breaks. With all the wedding planning, and working two jobs, I haven’t had much time to read. (I started it way back in July.) And as I sat reading a book that was printed nearly a hundred years ago, filled with words written before 1662, it hit me all at once that I was holding the oldest thing that has ever been inside the walls of the building.

Target rotates the sales plans about every three months and clearances out all the “old” merchandise to make way on the shelves for whatever new items are coming in. There isn’t a single thing in the whole store that is more than a year old. Even the building itself was constructed in 2001.

I finally realize that this is why I have always hated retail so much. Its sole focus is new. Something that is three months old must be replaced with something new because it’s not new enough. If a package is opened, we can’t sell it because it’s not new anymore. Old stuff doesn’t sell very well, isn’t popular enough, so it has no place there.

When Paul went to Athens to proclaim Christ, the city’s residents were described in this way: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.” When I hear my coworkers spend most of their conversations talking about the latest movie or a new restaurant, I realize that things haven’t changed much. We are a consumeristic society: We consume newness, in the form of new ideas, new products, new news.

What a contrast: God spent a fifteen hundred years writing a book in such a way that it would stay applicable for at least two thousand more, having no need of a replacement until everything in its pages has come true.

I put in my two weeks’ notice at Target last Saturday. I start work at SMART Public Safety Software down on Main Street in Cedar Falls on the 19th… I guess I just needed something new.