Again, I want to take a moment to reiterate the basic concept of this particular set of blogs if you haven't read the first couple in this series. Perhaps following Jesus is just as likely to lead us
to lay down our rights as it is to lead us to fight for them.
Alright, now I’m going to get
downright heretical, if there was any doubt left in your mind after those two
entries regarding rights. What if, in
addition to laying down our rights to Jesus Himself, we were more concerned
about the rights of others, specifically the poor, needy and outcast? What if we spent more time defending the
rights of the orphan, widow and alien than defending our own rights as people
coming from places of relative wealth?
How radical would that be and what might it look like?
Thankfully, this is starting to
happen and pop up in different areas around our country. There is a strong and growing movement
towards downward mobility, a concept that I love and admire but have yet to
fully embrace myself mind you.
Christians who grew up in middle to upper middle class America are
instead choosing to live a life marked by poverty. Some might even refer to it as experiencing
the privileges of poverty. I will warn
you though that one person in particular who had a similar expression was
quickly rebuked by someone who had grown up in poverty that there is nothing privileged
about living in poverty. When someone
comes from a middle class to upper middle class or perhaps even upper class
into an inner city that is marked by abject poverty, there is bound to be some
collisions of worldviews, no matter how well intentioned the person practicing
downward mobility might be.
In spite of this fact, if you do
decide to go downwardly mobile and live among the poor, your life will be inexplicably
transformed and blessed as a result. I’ve
only experienced this from a relatively safe distance either on mission trips
or when my community group helps feed the poor at the boat ramp in town. Even then though, I always come away feeling
much more blessed than whatever small blessing I was able to pass along to
someone else simply by providing a listening and attentive ear and validating
and giving them hopefully a little dose of dignity along the way.
Maybe that’s why Jesus said it’s
more blessed to give than to receive.
That little nugget of wisdom has taken quite a long time to travel from
my mind to my heart as I do happen to love receiving gifts of any kind. However, it really rings true now more than
ever. I happen to love buying my
girlfriend presents now, even though I won’t see her until December. I anxiously await seeing her face again so I
can give her all the presents I’ve gotten for her since my time in Myanmar.
This has certainly been a strange
development in my life I have to admit.
I usually never buy presents for previous girls that I’ve had an
interest in. There has been maybe a
handful of times where I’ve ever bought a present for either a previous
girlfriend or previous girl who I was interested in due to my, well I’ll call
it thriftiness but others would probably refer to it as downright cheapness and
they might have a unbeatable argument I might add. There have been several other times where I
considered buying a gift for a girl but quickly thought the better of it as I
had no real intention of getting into a relationship with the girl when I was
perfectly happy being single at the time.
This has been compounded by the fact that when I used to take girls out
on really nice dates I quickly added up the credit card bill and was astonished
and saddened when I realized I had spent the equivalent of a round trip to
Chicago. Regardless, now I actually look forward to
buying my beautiful girlfriend Steffani gifts, which is mind-blowing to me
considering my previous history in gift giving.
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