Hugging the Monster.

Another detour, but some things much on my mind these days. This will be a random and rambling rant, and maybe not too cohesive. Enjoy :-).

If the economy continues to collapse in America, a lot of our mega-church and mega-ministry institutions will likely collapse with it – since they are built on the same principles (if you rely on donations to support your bloated, unwieldy organization, things will be getting tight for you very soon, I fear. Some TV preachers might have to sell their Bentleys). The measure of success for everyone in America - even those with a faith-centered worldview – is being severely tested, and will be even more so in the days to come. America is enduring much upheaval, precipitated mostly be events in our economic sector. You could argue that the foundation of our national stability has been our financial system, which seems to be rapidly morphing, maybe even collapsing. For many of us, the foundation of our personal lives is also our financial system, and the cornerstones of that foundation are the value of the house we own and live in and our source of income. And those are in jeopardy too. And things could get a lot worse. Maybe.

One of the things you learn in survival training is that the sooner you accept the traumatic event you have been faced with, the greater your chance of surviving it, especially if you have considered the possibility of it happening before it does (thinking the unthinkable). One author calls this “hugging the monster.” Or as Steve Buscemi so succinctly put it in “Armageddon” – “It’s time to embrace the horror!” 

So let’s hug the monster. Let’s ask the big question. What if it all collapses. What if we lose everything?

My parents are from a different generation than the parents of most of my contemporaries. While I grew up with the children of late Boomers (born after WWII), my dad was 40 when I was born, which means he was born in the mid 1930s, which places him squarely in the “Builder” generation. So I grew up hearing first-hand accounts of the latter part of the Great Depression (he was just a kid, but remembers it) and the World War II era. It’s amazing how bad things were – not just in folks’ personal budgets, but all around. We can all imagine not having enough money to buy a hamburger, but what if the stores had no hamburger to buy, even if you had the money. Just one example of a reality I’ve never had to consider that they dealt with all the time.

What you learn from those stories is that people are profoundly resilient, and that in times of great suffering the things that are really important – family, faith, community – become the focal point of our lives again. The simple answer is, if everything collapses, we will suffer greatly, but we will also find out matters most, cling to what is good, find a way to survive, and probably be better people because of it all. That’s what my parents’ generation did, and so will we.

Adversity breeds character. Unfettered prosperity often breeds complacency and corruption.

Now for what I really wanted to say (yep, that was just the intro). I was backing up a hard drive yesterday and saw a song I haven’t thought about in awhile. It’s a very short tune by Jason Upton, no more than a couple of minutes long, jammed in between epic 10 minute tunes on one of his albums. Its words are appropriate and haunting:

There’s a power in poverty that breaks principalities, brings the authorities down to their knees.
There’s a brewing frustration, an ageless temptation to fight for control by some manipulation.
But God of the kingdoms and God of the nations, the God of Creation sends this revelation,
Through the homeless and penniless Jesus the Son: ‘The poor will inherit the kingdom to come.’

Where will we turn when our world falls apart, and all of the treasures we’ve stored in our barns can’t buy the Kingdom of God?

And who will we praise, when we’ve praised all our lives men who build kingdoms and men who build things, but Heaven does not know their names?

And what will we fear when all that remains is God on the throne with a child in His arms, and love in His eyes…

And the sound of His heart cry.

Those words are true to the teachings of Scripture (email me if you need the chapter and verse), and they inform the rest of my thoughts. We have lived for most of my lifetime in relatively uninterrupted prosperity as a nation, with a few short exceptions. Unfortunately for my family, one of the worst economic periods since the Depression was the late 70s, and that’s when we were forced to sell our house (unemployment was high, interest rates were high, inflation was high, and my Dad left the Air Force in ’79, we lived in Montana – the perfect storm) and move our family of four into a 16×80 mobile home, where we lived from my first grade year on, and where my parents still live. We had very little, and sometimes we weren’t sure where the next meal was coming from, but by the time I graduated high school my Dad had gone back to college, entered a whole new career at the ripe young age of 50, and the folks had climbed just enough above the poverty line to keep me out of the running for the best government grants and assistance for college available to a lower income white kid. Except for the loans, of course. They’ll always saddle you with the loans…

Some people say today is like back then in the 70s. Some say it’s heading towards being like the 30s. I say it could be either. Or neither. No way to know for sure – and it’s really out of our hands. Whatever happens, we’ll have to hug the monster and make it through.

So in my life I’ve seen days of plenty and days of destitution. Both have their teaching moments. Sometimes I think it’s actually a lot harder to learn to live as a follower of Jesus when you are in a season of prosperity. Jesus seemed to think so. Thus His whole “rich man entering the Kingdom vs. camel going through the eye of the needle” metaphor. That’s not to say I want to go back to the “easy” way. I think I’d rather try getting my keister to thread that that needle…

But I am thinking a lot these days about the “homeless and penniless Jesus the Son,” who God sent to teach us how to live. By every standard we judge success – including those we use in Church-land, He was a spectacular failure. Which tells us that we are still measuring the wrong things. He did not own a home. He did not succeed in business. He did not overthrow the oppressive political regime of His day or effect even a small amount of political change during His lifetime. He didn’t even have enough money to pay taxes and his treasurer was embezzling what little there was (which makes Him a bad CEO – He allowed financial corruption at the highest level of His organization).

And He changed the world.

I’m not enjoying all the stories I am reading of churches and church organizations struggling to make ends meet and having to downsize, sell off, and shut down. But I’m not surprised. Our organizations and buildings and structures and soul-making machines have mirrored our society. When it begins to contract, fail, implode, and collapse, so will we. All my life we have worshipped large ministries (TV ones when I was a kid, mega-churches from college until today), great organizations, and larger-than-life public personas.

But whose names does Heaven know? It’s not always the winners we revere, but the “least of these” who act out faith, hope, love, mercy, and justice in Jesus’ name every day. I think we’re entering an era where the “bigger is better” mentality will be exposed for the hollow. self-congratulatory philosophy it is. Something new will emerge from the decimation of our man-made view of the Kingdom.

I don’t know what it will look like – large or small, buildings or rented spaces, underground or mainstream – and I’ve given up trying to guess. All I really want is to stop praising men and their kingdoms and go back to praising Jesus and studying His way of living. All I really want is to find my faith fully invested in the homeless Son of God, who taught us that children know more about these things than PhDs. All I want is to be known in Heaven, counted among the faithful, one of nameless mass of “others” Hebrews 11 says the world was not worthy of. All I want is a life that matters, not just to people on this planet, but to its Creator.

Whatever it takes to make that happen, I’m ready to hug that monster. Here’s hoping he’s not too slimy…