First paycheck!

My first paycheck came on Friday! :) It's a reassuring thing to know that I can pay rent for the next month! Before I received it, I had been thinking through my budget and asking Jesus how he wants me to use my income generously for his purposes and to provide healing and help and community for other people. Studying Jesus' words and actions in the book of Luke has been convicting me that if I have more resources than I need, it's unjust to hang onto them all for myself. And yet it's a funny thing that when I got my first paycheck and ran through my mind how to spend it, ME and my needs consumed pretty much all of it. Part of it is that I'm having to pay for everything I need now on a fairly slim budget, as my work is part-time and my savings are depleted, but I think that another part of it is that tendency to see our money and resources as ours for our benefit, not as resources that have been entrusted to us as part of a community and ultimately as belonging to God. It reminds me again that right living is much easier to conceive of theoretically and much harder for me to practice! Jesus, I need your grace!

Free lamp

I'm tired and have to wake up early tomorrow, but I wanted to let you all know that my first three days of work at the Red Cross have gone well. I really enjoy my coworkers and immediate boss so far, and the people really make it a pleasure to work there. I never really saw myself doing administrative work, but with my rapidly growing commitments to spending time with people through Servant Partners and Northwest Neighbors, I'm wondering if it might not be a bad thing to have a job right now that doesn't exhaust my people energy.

I also got to experience a different sort of first today--taking furniture that's been dumped on the street! My roommate and I saw a lamp in the pile, and we'd been thinking about getting another lamp because our living room has no central light and is pretty dark, so we thought, "hey, free lamp! Might as well at least plug it in and see what happens." This is all happening at 11 pm, as we get back to Pasadena from our Luke study in South L.A.. So we casually saunter over (my roomie was rather mortified), nab the lamp, and scurry back to our apartment. It leans a little bit, but it hasn't caught fire yet, and it's lovely and bright. :)

Employment :)

I finally have a job! It's a part-time administrative assistant position at the Red Cross. It doesn't have benefits, but it pays well, and in several months, a full-time position is supposed to open up that I can apply for if I like the job. It's not exactly what I was thinking when I started my job search at the beginning of October, but at this point I need SOME job! And I'm looking forward to getting experience inside a professional nonprofit. Wish me luck!

An economy of enough?

"When you think, 'How do I love my neighbor as myself?' it becomes just impossible to do that within the worldview of the American dream. But I think what's exciting is that Jesus has another dream, and Jesus is offering us [that] dream. Where it's not even just this ascetic simplicity--give up everything and be poor--but it's this idea that God created an economy of enough. God didn't create a world of scarcity. But we've created poverty and need by not living out this command to love our neighbors as ourselves." Shane Claiborne, in "Laying it Down: Learning to live with less in a culture of excess," in Relevant Magazine, May/June 07 issue.

I think sometimes in conversations about simplicity, at least early on in the learning process, which is where I'm at, poverty can become this exalted thing while wealth is condemned. So I want to clarify that I'm not trying to say that. From the tiny bit I know about poverty, it's not a wonderful and exciting state; it's marked by various issues such as hunger and food insecurity, job insecurity or unemployment, disease and lack of health insurance, lack of opportunity, etc. All of which is further complicated by abuse and oppression based on racism, sexism, and homophobia. No one should have to live in that kind of situation.

All too often, however, wealthy people (and Westerners often do this to people not from Europe or America) don't see beyond the physical needs to some of the other characteristics that can mark poverty-stricken communities. Poor followers of Jesus in other countries have immense things to teach the wealthy American church about what it means to follow God and actually trust Jesus with your life. The most generous people I have ever met, outside of family members, have largely been those with little economic wealth, but with large reservoirs of hospitality and generosity. We've got to work against our arrogance by putting ourselves into relationships with people in different economic situations and being willing to learn from them. I need help with my own arrogance and assumptions.

Moreover, if this world really was created with an economy of enough, than the fact that I have way more than I need to be provided for and even comfortable is in direct relation to the fact that fellow members of the human family do not. And that makes wealth very morally problematic to me. I must say I think the "trickle down" theory of wealth is enormously ineffective and brutal economically and morally as a solution. I'll be the first to admit I don't have the answers to exactly how to love my neighbor as myself or what to do with my wealth and education and opportunities. But I am compelled to keep asking the questions and muddling forward in a community of fellow muddlers after a different way of living.