Rocks and the National Debt

Recently there has been much hoopla made concerning the debt ceiling and the recent deal struck between Republicans and Democrats to raise the limit on Uncle Sam's credit card but with corresponding cuts in government spending. I'm not going to get into the political implications or whether it will solve the long term issue.

What I want to talk about is what the existence of a 14 trillion dollar debt (yes, that is $14,000,000,000,000) says about our society, about our culture and about Christians living in that culture.

I started gardening three years ago. We have three acres of land behind a public park and to help deal with the stress of owning a business, teaching Sunday school and raising two teenagers (and they are good ones, can't imagine what having difficult ones is even like) I began to plant vegetables and discovered I have a 'green' thumb. I'm still in the learning stages and I am getting more and more produce every year. I enjoy it, it's inexpensive and it helps me keep my sanity.

My pile of Rocks with my beautiful 5'6" Daughter

The soil where we live is very dark and very rich. But it is filled with rocks. I use raised beds to make sure the roots can grow deep into the ground (I've pulled tomato plant roots out of the ground that were six to eight feet long). So I proceeded to manually clear rocks out of the ground. As you can see by my growing pile (3 feet high in the center and about 10 feet in diameter) I am not exaggerating. The area I have marked off for the garden is approximately 30' x 20' and I have only cleared two thirds of the sectioned ground. Count a 'french dam' I made in the middle that is eighteen inches deep, foot wide and twenty feet long and filled with aforementioned rocks and you are beginning to get the idea of what I am talking about.

All by hand and a garden hoe*.

Now I know some of you think right now that I am just plain nuts. Why not get a tiller and be done with it? Well, because a tiller wont really solve the problem. It will move the rocks around but its not going to get rid of them. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. What we need to know is why the rocks are there in the first place.

Now some of you will argue that it really doesn't make a difference why the rocks are there. They need to be moved. But what if I had told you that I had hired a bulldozer to mix several tons of rocks into the ground thoroughly with the soil and that was the land that I chose to grow my garden. Then I would indeed be insane.

That is exactly what we did with the national debt. We kept electing politicians who promised us free medical care when we got older, a paycheck till we die, cheap pharmaceutical drugs for life, food stamps for everyone who even thinks they need them, free lunches for our kids at schools (and we can fight two wars at the same time!), etc, and then wonder why we have a 14 trillion dollar debt. We allowed our government to run this debt up so that we would not have to help those less fortunate than ourselves and allow government agencies to take care of people we should have been taking care of so we could live our lascivious lifestyles without paying higher taxes. Now we balk at paying back money we spent and did not have.

We made our bed but we have absolutely no intention of laying in it. 

Christians are suppose to be the salt and light of this society.  We are not to live as the world lives but Godly, Holy (separated unto God) lives. Where were we while all this was happening? We were lining up at the trough with our 'Prosperity' message that God wanted to make us all rich and have half a million dollar homes with a luxury sports car in the driveway. Jesus wasn't about sacrifice, he was Santa Clause with an unlimited platinum credit card to make all of our material wishes come true. 

What is absolutely despicable is that even as we all made large amounts of monies in the decades of the 1980's and 1990's we spent it frivolously. My guess is right now in the Church probably ninety seven percent of the congregation cannot write you a $1000 check even if their very life depended upon it. I am in that category.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, this has got to stop. We have to show our society how to change its spending habits and to be lenders and not borrowers. We have to be faithful stewards of God's money. Stewardship is the management of resources that are not your own. In the 1970's many Christians led the way with the environmental movements that showed us we were not being good stewards of God's planet (I am not an advocate of Global Warming. Having said that, I strongly believe in the frugal use of resources and I am against industrial pollution).

The Church needs a financial revolution. It needs to begin with ourselves.

Two years ago I started digging rocks in our finances. Rock by rock I am paying down our debt. Rock by rock cutting out expenses. Rock by rock cutting out excessive eating out. It has required major changes in the spending habits of our family. I would like to tell you that my family all jumped aboard wholeheartedly and was in total agreement. My life unfortunately is not a sitcom where everything gets resolved in 30 minutes. It has not been easy, but we are getting there and the family is beginning to see the light. Well, a little bit anyway. Within the next two or three years, Lord will it, we should be completely, 100% debt free.

The national debt debate is far from over. Part of the deal that the Republicans have made with the Democrats is that a bipartisan panel must come up with more cuts between now and the end of the year. It is almost certain we will hear much, much more about this in the coming months.

What we do with this debt will tell future generations all they will need to know about our character. Did we bring out the tiller and move things around and put more fertilizer over it and hoped it would go away? Or did we start taking out the rocks, one by one and with the clear understanding that it may not have helped us but saved the ones to come?

I am going out to dig some more rocks.


*(Digression: thanks for corrupting the word 'hoe'! Just like the word 'gentleman' which originally meant a landowner not a nice person and so now I cannot use the word 'hoe' without my teenagers giggling).

What does Easter, Rob Bell and Osama Bin Laden have to do with each other?

Spring is my favorite time of the year, and nothing to do with the weather. I live in the deep South (only three hours from the Gulf of Mexico) and truth be told if it wasn't for the Easter Holiday, winter wins hands down. If you have ever lived through 21 consecutive days of 100+ degrees winter is a welcome respite.

However, Easter reigns in the hearts of most Christians as their favorite holiday and rightfully so. Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the grave. The fact that a man claimed he was God in the flesh and then backed it up by appearing to many people after he died (including more than 500 in a single incident) is still the most historical electrifying incident to have ever occurred.  I am not going to use this opportunity argue the historical evidence of said event (there are many who have done a better job anyway such as Josh McDowell). You may have guessed this by the title and you're wondering what, pray tell, does Osama Bin Laden, Rob Bell and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ have to do with each other? Good question. Glad you asked.

Time Cover

Rob Bell is a wonderful pastor who has gone astray. Throwing a theological bomb he declares in his new book, Love Wins: A book about Heaven, and the fate of every person who has ever lived, that there is no hell and that everyone who dies goes to Heaven, regardless. First of all I would like to know what Bible he is reading because I've looked in every translation and hell is spelled out pretty clearly. I'm just a layman and even I can tell you that Pastor Rob Bell is in direct conflict with the Word of God. So does he believe the Bible or not? If he doesn't believe in hell then what other parts of the Bible does he have trouble with? The divinity of Christ? I digress.

This is where Bin Laden comes into play. I would love to see Rob Bell or anyone for that matter who does not believe in hell please explain how this guy is going to get into Heaven. He murderously, with forethought and malice, planned the execution of nearly three thousand civilians whose major crime was showing up for work. Most of them had probably never even had heard of Osama Bin Laden before that day. He not only took credit for the killings, he bragged about them.

Even with what I call the 'good-ole-boy' methodology of deciding who makes the cut to Heaven he falls way, way, way short. Nowhere near say Hitler or Stalin (and probably the only reason not is his inability to acquire a nuclear weapon) but the gulf between Osama and let's say Mother Theresa is just too wide to be bridged. If you think I'm exaggerating just remember the images of the people jumping out of the Twin Towers to their death so they would not be burned alive. How you can say that a man who was directly responsibly for that atrocity (and many other smaller ones) deserves Heaven and not a bullet to the head is incomprehensible.

Having said that, what people really struggle with, including Pastor Rob Bell, is a judgmental God. The underlying theme in people's inability to see evil, sometimes when it is standing right in front of them (say for instance Western Civilizations tendency to ignore Sharia Law) is the inability to see evil within themselves.

Let me explain.

People misinterpret God's reasoning for sending his only Son, Jesus. Jesus lays it out starkly clear in this parable (Jesus words):

"Hear another parable: There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a wine-press in it and built a tower. And he leased it to the vine-dressers and went into a far country. Now when vintage time drew near, he sent his servants to the vine-dressers, that they might receive its fruit. And the vine-dressers took his servants, beat one, killed one, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first, and they did likewise to them. Then last of all he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' But when the vine-dressers saw the son, they said among themselves, 'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.' So they took him and cast him out of the vineyard and killed him. Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-dressers?" They said to Him, "He will destroy those wicked men miserably, and lease his vineyard to other vine-dressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons." (Matthew 21:33-42)

Jesus is telling the Israelis (specifically at this point the religious leaders of that time) that God has come and he is going to take the covenant they to date have enjoyed and will give it to another people who will actually bear fruit (Christians).

Now before you get all comfortable with the fact that you are not an Israelite remember that in the Old Covenant God made a pact with the Abraham and his decedents and nobody else. If you were outside of the Jewish religion you were basically screwed. But that covenant did not work out, people still rebelled so God made a better way; a covenant based on Grace, not the Law.

If your a Christian you may be saying, 'Yea, good thing I wasn't one of this religious Pharisees! Those guys were so bad!".  Let's take this parable a step further. When I read that parable for the first time I wasn't thinking of the Pharisees. I was thinking of myself. God created us, gave us this beautiful world with plenty of resources to take care of ourselves and everyone around us and how do we behave? Despicable is a word that comes to mind. We are like the vine-dressers, rejecting God's son and trying to claim the Earth and the Universe as our own. We reject God's ways.

This is why we have trouble accepting the reality of hell because we have trouble accepting the evil in our hearts that denies the loving creator of this Earth and Universe the honor and glory he so richly deserves. We are still trying to kill his Son and steal our existence from God (Atheism, Gnosticism, Socialism, Communism, Neo-Darwinism and all the other 'isms'). God had every right to come to this Earth and destroy the wicked vine-dressers of this Earth.

This is why we point our fingers and wag our tongues at the murders, adulterers, swindlers, Charlie Sheen's and Miley Cyrus' of this world so that we do not have to look at the greater evil that resides in every one of our hearts.

That is the miracle of Easter. That God loves us so much that instead of his righteous judgement he offers a sacrifice none other than his Son to pay our debt and wipe the slate clean. But we must come on his terms, not ours. We must repent (turn away from) and acknowledge that we are the wicked vine-dressers who deserve death and it is then we can receive the life that Jesus offers through Grace.

I do not know Ron Bell's heart; no one does but God. I have a feeling though that what he is struggling with is what everyone struggles with when it comes to the existence of hell. I think it is not the idea of a God that would send people to hell but the idea that they themselves are wicked enough to deserve such a place.

We are and we do.

Nope, I've changed my mind. Winter is my favorite season. Through the busyness of spring and then summer and the madness of fall there comes a time of peace and quite and all of nature and man rests. Yes its cold and yes many things die. But, apologies to Ron Bell and his ilk, there is a helluva spring coming.