Day: October 30, 2013

How will it end? Or land?


 

Sometimes it feels like the world is heading towards landing points on all major issues and when the last of the issues still hovering finally find their landings, everyone would turn to look at each other and maybe ask “what now”.

Last weekend there was a speaker in church who suggested ecologically sustainable consumption is a Christian duty. On its face that’s a benign and utterly correct statement. Dig a little and you’d soon find notions of improvements, enhancing values, effective incentives and poverty eradication all challenge the otherwise pristine proposition that ecological sustainability is an overriding objective.

Similarly, the humanity considerations of dealing with the refugee phenomenon appear to require more critical and perhaps coldly objective evaluation when faced with the blurring of boundaries between traditional refugee criteria of fleeing war and persecution and contemporary experience of unapproved migration for social or economic causes.

And then there’s the macro economic issue of big government versus liberalism in the form of personal liberty to pursue economic activities. The recent stoush between Obama and the GOP clearly illustrate this point. On the one hand the issue of an ever increasing government size and the resulting spending (read: deficit) sounds like a bomb that would one day but surely, explode. On the other, tales of the working class poor as a growing demographics in the world’s most powerful country – a country which is supposed to be a beacon of freedom and wealth generation – suggests curtailing government intervention is perhaps not the best way forward. At least not at this moment in time.

Last Sunday, Tress and I turned and chatted to someone we got to know in church recently. He works for a well-known international aid organisation so the issues of food scarcity and changing patterns of consumption were perhaps stuff I thought he would be keenly interested in. We discussed generally the sermon we just heard. I thought there is something to the principle of living as a community of faith, where God’s edict of loving your neighbour as yourself, in the quest to land these issues.

Maybe instead of adopting the trajectory of bipartisan adversarial approach of left versus right, conservatives versus liberals, big government versus individual liberalism and such other contests, the answer lies in the gospel – in the form of living as a community of faith, where God dwells in and among man. Surely there is something to that. Perhaps extrapolate. God has bestowed plenty of creative and cognitive ability to His children. Obedience and industry amongst His people – would that take the world to a better place? Better landing, before the fuel runs out?

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