One of the things reading The Paradox of Choice made me aware of is how much of our conversation is about buying stuff. We talk about what we are thinking of buying, be it house, car, electronics, friends share their opinions of their own house, car, product or the other ones they tried when shopping themselves. Or, we talk about things we already purchased, whether we are happy with it or not, the deal we got, the money we saved. I don’t know how much of our actual conversations as a society consist of this kind of talk but I would estimate it to be 30-50%, is that too high?
Fortunately, not all conversations have to be about stuff, but I think we often find we don’t have anything else to talk about. I think there used to be the saying that Religion and Politics were Taboo subjects, because they where controversial, and so you should avoid talking about them. I wonder if the realm of taboo subjects has greatly expanded, that it pretty much includes everything except for buying stuff. Well, I guess it includes the weather, TV shows and sports, but other then that most surface level relationships and conversations never seem to get deeper then that.
Q: What’s your estimate of how much of your conversations in total is talking about Stuff and purchasing stuff.
“You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.” -Hebrews 10:34
I talk a fair bit about giving things away, living simply, sacrificially giving and living in a way so that others needs are met. I’m no where near the place I would like to be in that endeavor but I hope that I am making strides. However, verses like this spur me on and point out how far I have to go in my effort to follow Christ.
I’ve had a number of things stolen from me in my life (mainly bikes) and I must say, that for me, there is a marked difference between my stuff being stolen and me freely giving it to someone. Much of that difference is in my attitude about the situation and what my focus is on. I’m fascinated by the attitude and focus of the Hebrews written about above, who joyfully accepted losing their stuff. I am amazed by what a testimony that is to where their treasure and joy lies, even now reading it 2000 years later, I can’t imagine the testimony that must have been to those taking their property and others watching their decisions to choose love, community and fellowship over worldly possessions.
When I really start to reflect on this stuff, the persecution that they endured, the persecution people endure today (The Heavenly Man), and the lack of persecution I feel I’m encountered with in my surroundings, I’ve recognized something about it. I think I’ve tended to think in very pure terms about the persecution of the early church. I have a tendency to think that the persecution they received was very clearly because they where following Jesus:
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.”
However, I don’t think it was always as pure a case as we tend to think of it as. Jesus wasn’t crucified because he was the messiah and the Roman’s knew they had to fulfill the Scripture, he was killed for creating political unrest. The disciples likewise probably did not simply experience persecution because they choose to claim themselves as Christians, but also because of the actions and life choices that their following Christ lead them to.
I say all this to simply just acknowledge that I have a long way to go to be in a place where I can follow Christ to the degree that I’m willing for it to result in people taking my stuff and me being joyful about it. And I’m not at the point yet where I clearly understand that choices I make to follow Christ might result in persecution that might not have anything to do explicitly with what religious allegiances I have.
(for some reason I don’t think a lot of this made much sense. Oh well.)
Last week I read the book, The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun. I’ve heard it recommend a handful of times as a telling story of China, modern day miracles, the persecuted church, and one man’s incredible testimony to God’s faithfulness. I found all that and more.
I want to be completely honest in this, but please don’t take offense at what I’m about to say. I really enjoyed reading this book. It was encouraging and challenging in many ways. However, I also at times, got tired of reading it. Brother Yun is constantly being beaten within an inch of his life, thrown in prison, and persecuted. I’m not saying it was okay for me to feel bored of reading about persecution, just that I did. It’s amazing to think that people have endured such intense and long lasting persecution even new.
I’ve subscribed to Voice of the Martyr‘s magazine for a number of years. For the past couple years in Nashville I was just getting emails, and I honestly wasn’t reading them, but fortunately a good friend at church was always making efforts to remind others of the persecution going on in the world and encouraging us to pray. This book was another challenge to “Remember those in chains as if you yourselves where in chains.”
I went to a community meeting yesterday and got to hear the crime update from the Inspector Michael Martin who is the commander of the fourth precinct where I live. He comes to the Hawthorne Huddle every month and updates the community on the safety and crimes in the area, allowing himself to be accountable for what is and isn’t happening. Yesterday, he shared a interesting bit of news.
Currently in 2008, North Minneapolis has the lowest Crime Rate in Minneapolis (According to Part 1 crime stats, which are all the serious and likely to be reported crimes). It is 2+ months into the year, and it is cold outside, but those are the same factors for the rest of the city as well, downtown, south, East Bank, etc.
What’s unfortunate, is that you won’t find a newspaper story anywhere about this encouraging bit of information. Why not? Your guess is as good as mine. According to the media, North Minneapolis isn’t a real place with real people living there, it’s an archetype for an adventurous place where danger lurks around every corner. Reality shows are big on TV, so are action films and murder mysteries, so the newspapers and local news stations compete by creating North Minneapolis into their own reality adventure. Don’t look at the news and tell me you know anything about North Minneapolis.
Sorry again for the less then substantive posts. I promise to get back to regular posting shortly. For now, I thought I’d make another brief push for joining the Economic Stimulus Giving Spree. We are almost at our 20 person goal:
(and you can sign via Facebook now)
In other news, I know right after a serious of boring and sporadic posts is probably not the best time to pump the subscription page, but humor me okay 🙂 I’ve updated the Subscription page for those who might be interested in just subscribing to particular posts or categories of posts, you can see the options at the Subscription Page.
And finally, if you haven’t been to the site recently, please stop by. I’ve created some fancy little post banners for some of my more substantive posts and they rotate through in the sidebar. You might find one that peaks your interest. If so, be sure to leave a comment!
Since I haven’t written any real blog posts in a week, it’ll take me a little bit to get back into the groove of things. With that said, I figure I could ramble about a few political thoughts. Don’t worry nothing inflammatory or profound here. Just random.
I’d really like to find a Christian who considers themselves a republican to dialog with. I realized when I started learning about politics (which wasn’t till about freshman year of college, and even then I didn’t know R from D, Left from Right or which animal was which), I never really gave the Republican view a chance to explain itself. I looked at my views as a Christian and then looked at the political views and being Republican just didn’t make sense to me. I don’t mean that as an attack, just my honest thought. So, what I’d love to do is be able to hear from someone about why the believe and support the political views that they do in light of Scripture. Not a debate, just me listening and asking questions for clarity. Just don’t know anyone… Any suggestions?
I’m interested in politics this year, but it seems to be for different reasons then four years ago. I’m still quite skeptical of the political parties, Democrats and Republicans specifically, I’m more of a third party guy. But, it’s exciting to me that for the first time in this countries history we could have a president who isn’t an old white guy. I’m trying to avoid any bandwagons, but that is exciting.
Local politics. Not that I’m interested in running, but for a variety of different reasons, I’ve been thinking about the impact of local political power. One of the council members for our neighborhood is Don Samuels, from what I’ve read and heard he’s a pretty awesome guy, and he happens to go to the same church as us.
Politics and Protest. I’ve attend my share of protests, not an insane amount, We don’t make cross-country road trips to break windows and get tear-gassed, but I have taken the opportunity to raise my voice (and sign) in solidarity with others to make our message known. The more I’ve done it the more I’ve realized how much creativity is lacking in the protest movements of the day. We need some inspiration from old school activist. Which reminds me of this awesome book I read a few years ago called Rules for Radicals.
At a community group I was at a few weeks ago we happened to be discussing the topic of ‘community’ (go figure). It was a really interesting conversation, and I’m looking forward to building relationships with the many people from our neighborhood that attend. At one point in the conversation an interesting topic came up.
Basically, someone had shared a story about opening their home to a stranger and that person had then taken advantage of the opportunity and stolen some things. The attitude of the community group was really encouraging to me for a number of reasons. First, though it seems pretty clear in scripture we are to share with those in need, it’s seems so rare that I hear about a person from church opening their home, so the story itself was encouraging to me. Secondly, the response from others seemed to encourage the decision and acknowledge that sometimes those things will happen, rather then say things that might discourage people from taking similar actions of opening their home.
All this made me think about the example of Jesus, who became close friends with a person he knew would betray him. There has to be some insight we can gain from that example. I don’t even think the person betraying Jesus being one of his disciples was prophesied previously (not that it really matters, but some people use that as an explanation of why it wasn’t a ‘choice’ and thus not something we should then follow as an example for ourselves).
The relationship of Jesus and Judas adds a whole new dimension to Jesus’ commands to “Love our Enemies.” It challenges in many ways the notion of ‘safety‘ that often taints our ability to follow Christ’s teachings to the full.
If your interested in investigating Jesus and Judas’ relationship with this particular idea in mind, here are all the verses in Matthew referencing Judas. Let me know what you discover.
I’m back at it, with another book review, which is still on track with a book a week, though I started lagging behind recently. This book comes recommended by my friend, Neeraj.
The book I read, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz is all about the paradox that the freedom of having more choices seems to make us less happy. I really enjoyed this book and its insights. He basically divides people into two main categories when it comes to making choices: Maximizers and Satisficers. Maximizers want to find the best option no matter what it takes, Satisficers are willing to settle for less then the best. Though, you might think it’s better to be a Maximizer, the reality is that with so many choices available you can never really be sure you’ve found the ‘best’ option and thus maximizer’s lead a life of constant choice seeking, regret at not making the right choice, comparing choices and more. Being a Satisficers allows people to not be captivated by choices but simply chose and continue about their lives focused on the more important things.
An example of this in my own life is when it comes to groceries. I shop at three different places: Cub, Aldi, and Hampden Park Coop. For ethical reasons there are certain things I buy only at the coop, for financial reasons there are things I generally buy only at Aldi, but then there is a wide range of things in between. I constantly agonize over where to purchase certain items, whether the price difference justifies going organic, and the possible ramifications of the options. And this is quite constant. So, as it relates to certain food items, I tend to be a maximizer, which when you think about it, is sort of ridiculous. The time I’ve spent thinking through the items and options, the mental anguish that’s taken toll at being unhappy with the choice I made and so forth is certainly not worth the small, almost insignificant price differences between many of the products. Now, you might have different areas that you ‘maximize’ in and sometimes that’s okay, but often it leaves us much less happy then we’d otherwise be.
If you just google the book title you’ll find some good summaries and thoughts on the book, so I won’t do too much summarizing here, but for my benefit and yours here are the areas I thought where interesting:
We Spend Too Much Time Choosing– though we’ve always acknowledge that community and relationships are what makes us happy, in our consumer culture we are spending more and more time shopping, but at stores and online, looking for the best deals.
Opportunity Cost Makes Us Regret– I’ve mentioned opportunity cost before, but it’s negative effect is that when we make a choice, even if we are happy with it, we will inevitably regret the missed opportunities of what we could have done with that same money. (i.e. a vacation at the beach, while regretting not being in the mountains)
Social Comparison in a Global Society Leaves Us Longing– We constantly compare ourselves socially to others, and in small circles that’s usually okay as we’ll likely interact with people at similar socio-economic levels, but with internet, TV and advertising we are left constantly longing to be like that person whose richer than us.
There are a lot more tidbits and the studies he references are so interesting. I could write more but I’ll just leave you with some links and videos below. Next week I’ll try and write more about what I’m going to try and do with this new found knowledge.
20 minute summary at TED Conference (watch either this one or the next one, probably not both)
This is mostly a personal update. The weather has finally been beautifully nice up here, but the kiddo and I have been sick the whole time so we haven’t gone outside to enjoy it. Today, hopefully, we finally will. The sickness is mostly to blame for the lack of substantive postings, as well as some fun games of Scrabulous.
But, the real news is this. My friends, Daniel and Amanda, community members from Nashville, are going to be on the Oprah show today. So, find your TV mid-afternoon and enjoy. It’s channel 4 at 4pm here in Minneapolis. Check your local listings.
They’ve already got some great pictures and quotes on the Oprah website for you to check out.
Last week I read the book, 
