In my family we’ve made rejection of this a priority.  We try and keep work to a minimum.  We don’t over-commit (which means we often under commit) to ministry work.  We don’t sign our child up to do, well, anything. We don’t go out very often and we are getting good at saying ‘no’ when too many options present themselves on the weekend.  Doing all of this has been a great improvement in our lives.  We feel less hurried and we end up spending a crazy amount of time together as a family.  When an opportunity comes up to see friends, to help out with a project that is a good cause, or to just go play at a park we almost always have time.  Friends could call on a moments notice to hang out or to ask for help and we’re here just waiting.

But this is where the problem begins to surface  We’ve learned that making time in life for relationships, family, and friendships is the right path, it’s an awesome step in the right direction.  However, if no one else takes that step with you…it’s lonely and, quite frankly, boring.

You see, now we’ve got all the time carved out and, well, we don’t know what to do.  We sit around the house basically staring at each other because, while family time is awesome, eventually you want to connect with other families (be it friends or extended family of your own).  And, if none of them have the same vision you’re left sitting on the sofa hoping that someone will call.

So, this entry was born in frustration that we’ve made the step to build relationships, we’ve cut things out of our lives to make time…and no one else seems to be willing to put their money where their mouths are.  Why not?

I love my friends.  I love my family.  I understand that everyone isn’t on the same life journey as we are.  But it would be awesome if more people started taking time out of their lives like they say they want to. Everyone says they’re too busy, but no one actually does anything about it.

Sure, it’s a selfish request, but here’s my encouragement.  Stop complaining about being too busy and take some actual steps to simplifying your life.  If enough people actually start living this way, we won’t be so bored.  Now go out there and learn to say “no” more often!! ;)

“Most white suburbanites complain about their taxes being increased because they work hard and don’t want to subsidize a welfare state.  They feel they’re paying for those who are ‘lazy’ and don’t want to work or supporting those with drug or other habits that they don’t think their tax dollars should pay for.”

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard this same old argument about why people don’t want to pay higher taxes.  I’ve heard countless people who are otherwise compassionate declare that they don’t want their money going ‘down the drain’ to social programs that don’t work. I even used to think this myself.  Then three different things changed my view:

There is no qualifier

I’ll never forget the day that Dean made an offhanded comment that solidified something for me.  He was talking about the ‘more taxes for lazy people’ complaint above and pointed out that Jesus gave no qualifier for helping the poor.  He didn’t say “give to the poor…but only if they’re not on drugs” or “give to the poor….but only if they work hard”.  He didn’t even say “give to the poor…but only if it’s done directly and not through a larger government program.”  He asked us to give to the poor…period. There was no qualifier.

The Modern Tithe

The second perspective changer came from a book called Pagan Christianity, which points out that our modern tithe does not equate to the tithe of the Israelites in the Old Testament.  Back then, the Temple was much more like the government than a ‘church’.  The tithe was taken in by the temple for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was to support the poor and widows who can’t take care of themselves.  (do you see where this is going?) If the temple is serving as the government and the tithes are taken to support the poor, you’ve got something that looks a WHOLE lot more like our tax/welfare system than a church offering plate.  God mandated people to pay into the welfare system of the day…and here we are complaining about it (oh, and we conveniently forget about “giving to Ceaser what is Ceasers”)

Corn Syrup Welfare

Now we come to thought #3 that hit me yesterday and brings us full circle back to Rich Benjamin’s “Searching for Whitopia”.  After him quoting this oft-used thinking, he points out a very intersting fact about where our tax dollars are actually going.

Those of us outside the big ‘urban’ states think that our tax dollars are all going to big cities (New York, LA, Chicago, etc) to support these ‘welfare leeches’, but the facts don’t support this.  When you look at where tax money is going, these states that have big cities actually take in less taxes than they pay out.  This means that our Red State money isn’t going to their cities, their city-earned taxes are going somewhere else…so where?

As it turns out, all of our big ‘farm’ states pay in WAAAY less taxes than they get in return from the government as corn and soy subsidies.  Our tax dollars aren’t primarily paying for ‘welfare babies’…they’re paying for corn and, more specifically, processed corn products.

If you’ve read any modern writing on how our food system works, you know that the government is HEAVILY subsidizing our “Fast Food Nation” of processed and packaged foods.  Didn’t you ever wonder why a bag of Doritos is ridiculously cheap compared to, say, an organic zucchini?  It’s because your tax dollars are making up the difference.

So, this brought my mind full circle to an incredible irony.  We suburbanites are chowing down our McDonalds, Cheetos, and Corn Flakes faster than anyone in the nation.  WE are the ones who are benefiting from these higher taxes.  These aren’t “welfare subsidies”…they’re “junk food taxes”.  If you want to complain about higher taxes, you shouldn’t be complaining about social programs, you should be complaining about how our government is pushing cheap, unhealthy, processed foods with your tax dollars. Funny how it’s always easier to point the fingers at others, but much harder to accept that our fast paced, junk food driven lives are really a major cause of our complaints.  I’m not sure if YOU see the irony in this…but I sure do.

Think, don’t rant

I intended this blog entry not as a political debate starter, but as a thought starter.  That’s why I’m leaving comments off.  In the past I’ve seen that posts like this just cause a knee jerk reaction but my hope is that, if you can’t comment, you’re forced to think about it to yourself.  Whether you agree or not isn’t the point…hopefully it’ll make you stop and think about the little bits of truth all around us that are cut off by political hacks and media pundits.

Did you notice that I assumed that most people reading this entry were not people I know in real life?  Sure, there’s some exceptions (”Hi Mom!”) but most people who know me don’t need to read my blog because, well, they know me.  They see me at least once a week.  They run into me at Starbucks.  They stop in for coffee or we work on projects together.  In my new, more analog, life, connections aren’t made or fostered online…they’re carried out around a kitchen counter.  Literally.

I think our society expects us to have too many friends…too many connections. We’re encouraged to put quantity over quality.  We’re expected to stay in touch with people who move thousands of miles away.  We’re expected to run our kids from one friends house to the next.  We have the burden of popularity, the need to be loved by many, the drive to make more connections with our limited time an attention.  I’m done with that.  I will have few friends.  I will make few connections. I will spend most of the time with my family (both immediate and extended).  I will make those relationships deeper and willfully let quantity fall by the wayside.

It’s not that I don’t want to be friends with you, oh dear blog reader.  I look at all the amazing connections I’ve made through my online life.  People I’ve tweeted with, blogged alongside, and facebooked.  People I then met in ‘real life’ at conferences, meetups, and trainings.  You are awesome and I wish I could be your friend.  However, I’m now fully convinced that relationships can’t be built online, only introductions or surface acquaintanceships.  I need some more serious weight on that corrupted word:  Friend.

How can you be my friend if I never see you to give you a man-hug (ya know, with the manly pat on the back so we don’t look too girly)?  How can I be your friend if I can’t give you a hand lifting something heavy or loan you a tool when you need to fix your car?  How can you be my friend if you don’t really know me through day to day conversation?  Sure, you can be an acquaintance.  But not a friend.  Not someone I can call in an emergency or someone I can lean on when I’m weak.  We have too many ‘friends’ in this Facebook-world and almost none in our actual living, breathing, human experiences.

So, (to take this question further to a problem it presents when the premise is accepted) with fewer, better, analog friends:  How do we stay in touch? How do we continue our friendship in a world built on Facebook and Twitter?

I ask this because I sit here in Starbucks alone. I yearn for some of those analog connections, yet to get them I have to fire up Twitter.  I have to text my peeps.  I have to use these ‘tools of distraction’ to make these connections happen.  We no longer live in a time when you can mail someone a letter (that would just be strange!) or even call them and say “let’s hang out”.  These methods no longer fit into lives crammed full of instant and unobtrusive communications.  We’re no longer able to just pop over to someone’s house or show up at their workplace because privacy and efficiency are more important than relationship.  We live in a world so separated and segregated that communicating directly is just plain rude since these connections are not run through our junk mail filter or archived in our Visual Voicemail box.

So, these two concepts sit side by side.  We need fewer and more analog friendships.  Yet, in this world we’re forced to use digital tools if we want those to happen. What’s the cure?  I suppose it has something to do with living closer together (this could mean city or small towns) and putting relationship over work…quality over quantity.

I strive for this change everyday.  The problem is…you can’t do it all by yourself.  So, who’s in?

Think back to the last political campaign (or any campaign you can remember).  During these campaigns, would-be presidents state what they believe about certain issues and what they will do in certain situations if and when they’re elected.  They hold to these core beliefs throughout the election cycle until one of them is in The Office.  Oftentimes, this is when things change.  When that person becomes president it’s a whole new world of information and insight.  They’re able to view top secret information, attend top secret briefings, talk to high level experts on issues, and otherwise fill their heads with a whole lot more information and perspective than they had before.

Now, let me ask this:  What would you think of a person who gains a whole bunch of information about a topic, information that is absolutely sure to change their perspective on some things, and yet still refused to change their opinion or stance on certain issues? What would you think of someone who got new insight which changed the game but they stayed stuck in what they believed before they got all that info?

I can tell you that, in this culture, we call them “confident”, we call them “sure of themselves”, and we call them a leader.  You know what I call them?  A prideful and arrogant person who can’t grow and learn.

When we learn new information about issues, situations, and life in general we should be changing.  We should be growing.  We should be thinking things like “that stuff I said last week was wrong now that I know this”.  And then we should be publicly stating that we lacked information and that we’ve grown since our last statement of belief.  But instead, we don’t.  In our world, changing our mind is seen as weakness. It’s seen as being wishy-washy or ‘passionate’ (in a bad way) or ‘flaky’.  It’s because of this perception that people continue down a straight and arrogant path, refusing to learn and grow, admitting that they may have been wrong in the past.

It’s funny to me whenever I listen to political commentary and “the other side” jumps all over a political figure as a “hypocrite” because they changed their mind on an issue.  How stupid is that?  I’ll tell you: incredibly stupid.  What’s the alternative?  You learn new information that should change your mind and you keep old and incorrect perspectives?  Shame on us for encouraging that.

Over the years I haven’t been afraid to change.  I’ve changed because I’ve learned life lessons and have learned that I was wrong in the past about various issues.  I’ve done this politically, spiritually, socially, and every other way you can imagine.  It’s funny because some people write me off as “passionate” or “wishy washy”, they think I change my mind and live in the moment. The reality is, I change my mind based on new information or personal interactions that teach me that my previous views were wrong.  I’m not afraid to admit that and no one else should be either.

As I always say, if anyone claims to have all the answers about anything (or even most of the answers, I don’t care the topic) I instantly don’t trust them and think them foolish. If you’re not willing to learn and grow, and in the process admit you’re wrong and make drastic changes to correct that, you’re missing out on living a life in the pursuit of truth.  I hope to see more and more people put down their egos, admit they’ve been wrong in the past, and change. I learn to do this more and more every day and have learned that change is the only thing that should be constant.

I’m not sure if everyone else has the level of nostalgia that I do, but it sure doesn’t look like it.

The more I thought about the disappearance of this world, the more I traced it to a single and monumental time in our history:  World War II. I used to think that our country had it’s most radical shift in lifestyles and ideas during the 1960s and Vietnam war…but the further I traced it the more I realized that the 60’s were only the practical and inevitable outcome of a post-WWII country.  The explosion may have happened during the Nixon years, but the fuse was lit on a quiet Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.

Everything we are, everything we know is almost universally a product of the second Great War. (I can hear a big giant “duh” coming from the history crowd) Lifestyles and expectations of what we ‘deserve’ were all born into existence during my grandparents generation.  We entered the 1940’s as a mostly rural-focused, simple country.  We left that decade an industrial and political super power.

As an example let’s look at the women’s liberation movement.  The 60’s get all the credit for freeing women but it was actually done 20 years earlier when Rosie the Riveter beckoned women to the factories and away from the  kitchens.  This was undoubtedly a step forward for women’s equality (which I embrace and applaud) but it was done at the expense of putting industry and ‘career’ before family (which I heavily regret).  It was Rosie that made women strong but the family weaker.  It was Rosie who was responsible for helping to win that war but made McDonalds meals the inevitable replacement for women who no longer knew how to cook from scratch.

Speaking of McDonalds…WWII is where our concern for our body’s fuel (ie. food) fell by the wayside. We had better things to do, like win a war…we didn’t have time to worry about what we put in our stomachs.  We’d outsource that to Swansons or Kraft.  The problem is when the war ended our culture and habits didn’t change.  We continued to live in ‘war mode’ eating prepackaged or pre-prepared foods which, as we see now, was killing us just as efficiently (albeit a little slower) than a Nazi bullet.

This whole ‘organic’ food movement is a direct backlash on post-WWII life. When the war ended we have a whole lot of explosives material and factories that we no longer needed.  It had to so somewhere.  Then someone had the brilliant idea of putting it in our food.  No, I’m not kidding.  The fertilizer that we now buy in bags from Home Depot is the product of too many unexploded and left over bombs from WWII.  The non-organic food we buy in supermarkets is sprinkled with explosives, which is why it’s so huge and green.

How about The American Dream? (and subsequently our overachieving and non-stop lifestyle) A direct product of the War. We came home victorious and proud to a country untouched by the ravages of war.  We were strong and wealthy and we started to believe we deserved it.  The 1950’s were the living of this dream that we though we deserved. We lived high on the hog in our suburban houses, we all bought cars, we shopped for fancy clothes and built bigger buildings.  We all ‘deserved’ dishwashers and washing machines so we bought them.  We decided that we and our American Dreams were more important than community and relationship.  We worked harder (and more often) to buy more stuff…we neglected our kids and outsourced their development to Mr Rogers, Big Bird, and Ronald McDonald.

I could go on forever but I’ll stop here.  We think that this post-WWII world has always been ‘the way it is’…but in reality it’s only 60 years old. Our previous 200+ years were radically different in this country (not to mention our previous thousands of years before this country).  We shunned self for community.  We worked hard, but not so hard that we neglected family.  We raised our own kids and cooked our own food.  We talked with people instead of e-mailing @ them.  We knew our neighbors and our farmers and we lived with them and supported them emotionally and financially.

And now I wonder how to escape this post-WWII world. How do you live in this era connecting with your family, your neighbors, the land, and God without the distraction and pull of a post-WWII world that constantly tugs on your shirt trying to lead you to a more ‘fulfilling’ life?  I have no answer, but I can tell you that I yearn to disconnect from the hussle (not to mention the bustle).  I look every day for ways to discard digital life for hard cold reality.  Someday I might get there but until then I’ll live each day as an opportunity to move closer to December 6, 1941..just hours before the day that lives in infamy..and the day that changed America and American lifestyles forever.

Me and my new baby

I go through stages in life probably just like anyone else does. For a while I’ll be super lazy, I’ll watch lots of TV, I’ll eat crappy food, I’ll neglect or forget any hobbies or interests I have, and I’ll work too much (and I’m starting to suspect the last item in that list causes the previous items).  Then, suddenly (and seemingly randomly) I’ll start pulling out of the funk.  Usually one small change ends up affecting many others and quickly I’m back on track learning new things, feeling more inspired, working less and living more.  This turn around happened recently and it’s meant more than living healthier:  It’s inspired me to attempt a whole new set of things that I haven’t done before. I was learning new things and, hopefully, growing in the process.

A month or so ago I sold my car simply because I hardly ever drove anywhere but I owned an SUV.  It was dumb.  So, I chucked that big beast and cajoled an ancient memory back into my life:  My 1993 Jeep Wrangler YJ. It was what I drove in high school and my parents had taken it off my hands and were storing it in Florida. They were hesitant to give it back to me because it needed alot of work (and they didn’t want me to waste my money).  But instead, I saw it differently:  I wanted to USE my money and this car to learn something new…I wanted to learn the basics of auto maintenance and repair and this was the perfect opportunity.

Since getting my old ride back to Michigan I’ve been learning alot out of necessity about how a car (and in particular this car) works and how to do the things we normally just pay Mr Muffler to do for us.  I’ve hurt my self, broke things on the car, and have gotten really really dirty in the process, but I’m learning.  And there’s where our little lesson comes in….

Over the years the people close to me have told me I’m good at picking up something totally new, pursuing it, failing constantly until, eventually, I can become proficient enough to seem like I know what I’m doing.  I’m more convinced than ever that they key to doing something new is being willing to fail at it….ALOT.  I can’t tell you how important I think failing is to learning something new.  Those who aren’t willing to fail are those who aren’t willing to learn and change and grow. The odd thing is, I don’t see myself as someone who fails gracefully.  I’m an artsy guy with pretty thin skin….I take criticism pretty hard on the inside while looking like I don’t care on the outside.  But somehow, when I’m learning something I want to learn, my skin gets tougher.  I think it’s because when learning something new it’s important to be up front about your amateur status.  When I walk into an auto parts store, I’m not going to pretend I know an alternator from a distributor (although now I kinda do!)…instead I’m going to be open about knowing nothing, asking advice, picking their brains, and soaking it all in.  Being willing to learn means humbling yourself and looking ignorant for the sake of gaining knowledge. (I think most guys are especially bad at this, but I’ve found that my artsy side helps here…I’m not concerned with being ‘manly’ and all-knowing like some guys are)

This brings me to the second key to learning something new:  I find it essential to read (alot) about what you’re learning before attempting the hands-on stuff. To learn about my Jeep I purchased two big thick user-manuel type books and started reading them cover to cover.  I, literally, only understood about 5% of what I read, but it was starting to craft a view of the situations I’d face when underneath the hood, and crafting this perspective is what I was looking for.

Sure, when I actually crawled underneath the body for the first time nothing looked like the book..but with constant reference back to those pages, comparing with what I saw, I started to gain perspective on the hunk of metal in my driveway.  I think the key to these books for me was the relative safety I had while learning.  I could go at my own pace…I could make mistakes (privately) and I could re-read parts many times until I understood it.  Books are crucial to learning….there’s nothing like the info in them online anywhere, so I find that spending the cash (or heading the library) to read up on your new adventure is crucial.

I feel like I’m pretty good at learning new things and I think it’s a skill everyone should learn to master because it’ll open up a whole world of opportunity and interesting people and places.  Here’s my tips in bullet point form:

• Find a reason to learn. Don’t decide to learn about cars without a car that will stop running unless you learn.  Don’t decide to learn about boats if you’re 100 miles from an ocean.  Do something that has immediate impact on your life and even your wallet.  Put your money and time into what you want to learn so you have something at stake…otherwise you’ll quit too quickly.
• Be ready to fail…ALOT. You’re going to look stupid and ignorant about the topic for a while.  Embrace that.  Use this to submit yourself to those who know more.  Learn from them.  They may look down on you but who cares:  You’re learning something new which makes you more interesting than them :)
• Get into books. They help you learn privately and at your own pace.  Learning in groups or in classes is OK, but I’ll argue that making it personal and having all the time in the world to learn something (as opposed to before the next test) makes it lifelong knowledge that won’t fall out of your head 2 hours after you’re graded on what you’ve learned.  Also, don’t rely on the internet or TV..they just don’t have the detail you need.
• Be so passionate about what you’re learning that it consumes you for short parts of your life. Learning causally or learning too many things at once is asking for failure or distraction.  Pick one thing and do it alot…for months.  Everything I’ve learned on my own has had a dedicated space in my life.  Whether it be web design, ancient history, the life of Silent Film star Buster Keaton, or philosophy, learning takes intense dedication…to the point people will probaly think you’re crazy.
• Finally, and this sounds obvious, but don’t give up. Keep failing, keep looking stupid because in the end, you looked stupid for a short time, but you won’t BE stupid like the people who laugh at you in the short term but never learn anything because they’re too afraid to try.

So, get out there and grab something new.  Invest yourself in it.  Do something way outside your comfort zone which is totally unrelated to your day job..and have fun!  Which reminds me, why am I in here staring at a computer screen when I can see the sun shining and my YJ in the driveway that needs muffler work?

The pics in this post were taken by Erik Rambo who was my companion on the 1,500 mile trip, driving the Jeep from Florida to Michigan…the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me….

On The Road

Me and Erik at our final destination after 24 hours on the road

Fit into the system or get out!

If you were privy to this URL before my recent 2-year blog shutdown you probably already know everything I’m going to say in the following paragraphs.  For years I ranted about the state of Christianity in the western world (particularly the American brand) and how off-track it has seemed.  Since then I’ve read many books, attended a few different churches for months at a time, and tried to find out why I was wrong.  Afterall, EVERYONE was telling me I was wrong.  I sought earnestly after justification of what seemed so wrong to me.  I tried to fit into a church and be a “good Christian”.  I even thought about joining a small group (if you’re outside the faith, think of these as manufactured friendships that you’re required to have ;)).  But ya know what I found on that journey?  Ya know what I realized after many years of honestly and earnestly seeking a proper view of church?

I was right all along.  The modern church is jacked up and has virtually nothing to do with The Bible or Jesus Christ.

It’s funny because the above statement will evoke two opposite responses depending on who you are.  If you’re a Christian who attends church weekly, is part of a small group, gets your paycheck from a congregation, or otherwise accepts the modern church as “the will of God”, you’ll write me off as another angry person who was somehow hurt by the church and now has an agenda against it.  If you’re a non-Christian, someone who has been turned off to faith because of the church you’re reaction will be quite different.  It’ll be more along the lines of: Yeah.  I already knew that.

So, what’s wrong with the church?  Why do I have such strong statements about it?  As I said, I’ve gone over this a million times and don’t really have the energy to say it again.  So, here’s just a few bullet points of the issues as I see them.

• Above all the church, and by extension the brand of Christianity we profess, is systematic. “To be a good Christian you do this, don’t do that…you live like this, you give your money here, you pray like this, you study the Bible this often….blah blah blah”.  It’s all crap.  Jesus came to destroy the systematic living of the Old Testament and we’ve done nothing but reestablish it.
• The church is no longer a group of believers. It’s a 501c3 non-profit business style entity.  It has policies, procedures, paychecks, mortgages, janitors, and boards.  It spends more time managing all this worthless junk than it does living the life Jesus calls us to.  It’s a waste of time, money, and in the end because of an incorrect focus, it’s giving many people a wrong impression of the faith and what it means to be The Church.
• The church is disconnected radically from everyday life. When you walk into a church you’re supposed to dress differently, act differently, talk differently, pray differently, and sing differently.  If you swear outside the church, you better not do it inside.  If you have a naturally loud voice, you better not even TALK inside the church…or else.  Again, Jesus came to abolish all this disconnection and false piety.  It’s the stuff of the Pharisees.
• Churches now fall into 2 categories:  Old & dead or Entertainment. Neither has anything to do with Christ.  Both bore me or make me angry because they’re leading people astray.

Let me clarify that I’m not talking, here, about little things that need to change about the church.  I’m suggesting that our entire concept of “church” is wrong. We would need to tear down our buildings, dismatle the staff and boards, and start anew if we were to get closer to what I believe God intends for us to be.  Too many times when I talk about the church being off track the answer I hear is “Well…OUR church isn’t off track”.  If your church has a building, a full time staff, ‘ministries’, or a board…then yes it is (according to my defintion).  So, a change in worship style, getting younger leaders, or becoming a more ‘organic’ church with new branding doesn’t fix anything I’m talking about…just in case you’re missing my point.  Let me also say that I want the church to be healthy and everything God wants.  I don’t want to see the church go away…I want it to be the church of the Bible..healthy and pleasing to God. (and if you’re thinking I’m talking about the house-church movement or ‘Acts churches’, again, you’re missing the point)

Once in a while God steps in and gives me a little nudge in a direction I need.  He did this yesterday and it was some much needed encouragement to say with boldness everything that you’ve read above.  He put a book into my hands called Pagan Christianity which exposes much of what I say above, but on a much more studied and in depth scale.  It was the encouragement I needed to move ahead bravely with the belief that the Christian faith as become systematic and disconnecting from this system is ok (or possibly even something God wants).  I’m not talking about disbelieving the Bible or ceasing my relationship with Jesus. These have nothing to do with the systematic problem.  I’m a believer in Christ and, as long as He continues to help me believe, I always will be.  The church, and the mess that it is, will never change that.  But there is a point where I no longer am willing to be a part of the system as an active supporter of this mess.

However, here’s the caveat to disconnecting from the church:  If you do that, you must continue to meet and study and pray with fellow believers, and this I am doing.  I’m not saying it’s ok to make your faith “a personal journey” and still be a follower of Jesus.  That flies in the face of everything the Bible teaches.  What I’m saying is that you can have real relationship, real study, real Christian life outside of this systematic church. It’s harder, but it’s also the real thing.  It’s not a systematic solution, it’s an organic one and it’s the one Christ intends for us.

So, while I’ll probably continue to attend a systematic church (if I’m honest, it’s more for my daughter than for me or my wife) I won’t put much stock in it.  I won’t support the system in any way.  I won’t be bullied or insulted into being a part of something that Jesus neither envisioned or (in my opinion) entirely approves of.  But I will continue to be a person who follows Christ the best I know how.  Nothing a systematic Church can say or do will stop this real relationship from growing until the day I go “home”:  A place without system and a place of pure relationship.

See all that grass behind me? That's how I roll...

In the Fall of 2008 my eating started to change pretty dramatically.  Mostly it was due to some wakeup calls by all the clichely referenced authors of my generation (Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser, Mark Bittman, et al) where I realized that, as Jamie Oliver puts it:  “We demand the best of everything from our beer selection to our running shoes, but we’ll put just about anything in our mouths”.  We have such high standards for things that don’t matter, yet we never think about what we’re putting in our bodies to be our fuel and, literally, our biological makeup.  So, one day last Autumn…I started paying attention.

Now, when I talk about “paying attention” I, of course, mean paying attention to the quality of food that I’m eating, the amount of processing that happened before it went down my gullet, and the actual ingredients that went into making what I was eating (as a side note, it’s it strange that foods we buy have “ingredients”?  That tells you how little we prepare our own foods anymore.  Ingredients means you’re trusting someone else to prepare your food for you….ok, tangent over)

However, thinking about what made up the food I ate wasn’t limited to the ingredients.  Every single food item we purchase has massive political, social, ethical, and even religious implications. (Do you think I’m overstating it?  If so, spend some weeks reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation, or go see Food Inc. and then let’s talk.) It’s not all about the food…it’s also about the way the food was made, who made it, how they were treated and compensated..and it’s also about how the FOOD was treated before it became food.

I’m no bleeding heart…but I do have a responsible conscience.  I also have a faith that presides over all of these decisions, which is why, to all outsiders, it looks like I’m a vegetarian.

Years ago when I was having some tattoo work done, the artist and I spent lots of time talking.  He was a vegan and I was a Christian and we were both interested in each other’s views on the world.  One question he asked that stuck with me to this day was “Why aren’t there more Christian vegetarians? Afterall, that’s the way your Bible says God originally  made us, before original sin”.  Bam. There it was.  My first exposure to faith and food issues intersecting.

Years later, this question still haunts me.  Not just because this is “the way it was in the beginning”, but for a more pressing reason:  This is God’s planet…people are God’s people…animals are God’s animals and, to put it bluntly, our food system (and therefore us, as consumers) treat all of them like shit.

I can’t possibly describe the conditions that the laborers experience in animal processing industry, but I can assure you:  It’s degrading, neglectful, and very, very dangerous.  These are God’s people and when I support the company that treats them like this, I’m responsible. Then, there’s the animals.  They are packed into areas where they stand knee high in their own crap for months on end.  They aren’t allowed to move so they get fatter quicker.  They get sick because of how they’re treated and fed and then we shoot them up with drugs so they’ll last just long enough so we can kill them in a pretty inhumane way.  These are God’s animals and when I support the company that treats them like this, I’m responsible. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, I’ll also point out that our industrial food system is destroying the planet with it’s monoculture, massive amounts of fertilizer, and total neglect for soil health.  And yes, if I buy from those companies, I’m responsbile for that too.

So how does all this lead to my title-question?  People see how I eat and they assume I’m a vegetarian. When they ask why I eat this way, they don’t really want the full answer because it makes them feel like I’m judging them (which, truly, I’m not…not everyone should be expected to come to the same conclusions just because I have).  So I respond with the easy answer:  I simply tell them “Yes, I’m a vegetarian.”  But it’s not true.

I’m not someone who thinks meat is bad for us.  On the contrary, I think it’s healthy.  I think God made animals for our use…But, the kicker here is that I think that 99% of the meat available to us is irresponsible (and an insult to God and his creation) and I won’t eat it or support companies who make it.  The ‘easy’ answer, the ’systematic’ answer is to become a raving judgmental and political vegetarian. But I refuse.  That’s just buying into a different system..one that is equally unthiking and indiscriminate.

So, what’s the answer?  It’s harder, but I believe it’s correct:  You must think about every piece of food you put into your body. How was THIS food grown?  How was THIS animal raised?  What does it mean for my faith?  What does it mean for my politics?  If you think through this every time you put something in your mouth I can almost assure you that, in a short time, you’ll also find that the only option is to eat very differently than most of us do now.  We might all look a whole lot more like vegetarians.

In practice, here’s what I’ve come to.  I don’t think it’s systematic and I think it’s in line with the principals of my faith:

• I eat no  factory produced meat (which is literally all meat you get anywhere except directly from a local farm)
• I eat as little processed food as possible. (anything in a box, bag, wrapper, or bottle is going to be processed)
• Generally (although not a hard and fast rule) I eat local meats only once a week. This is more of a personal preference since I actually enjoy eating mostly vegetarian.
• If I buy meat, I talk to the farmer face to face first.  I ask about their farm, their animals, and I listen to their passion and love of their work.  If they don’t love their animals and have a commitment to raising food how it was intended, I won’t buy it.
• When talking with the farmer, I try to build them up and encourage them.  Imagine how hard it must be to be a small farmer fighting the enormous system that says you should be raising your animals feedlot style.

So, am I a vegetarian?  Not really.  Do I eat like one?  Most of the time, I do.  So, next time we have a discussion about this and you ask about my eating habits, don’t ask unless you really want to know the full story.  If you want a short version that just writes me off as crazy so you don’t have to think about changing, don’t expect the truth.  My answer to you will simply be:  Yes.  I’m a vegetarian.

Hi.  My name is Bob and I’m a recovering right-wing Republican.

If you knew me a handfull of years ago, you no doubt knew my politics.  I talked about John Kerry like he was an idiot, I thought anyone who was pro-tax-increases was a communist, and I had a 8 foot wide George W. election sign in my front yard (which I replaced every time the neighborhood kids tore it down).  I still think Kerry is an closer to an idiot than a saint, but lots of other things have changed over the past few years and my outlook on politics has changed, quite dramatically, with them.

You see, I’m a person of faith…a follower of Jesus.  I used to think that the obvious outpouring of my faith was to be a Republican.  I never really questioned that.  I think I’m at least a quasi-smart and thinking man, so it’s not like I was being led there blindly.  Many of the arguments and statements made by the party made lots of sense.  I found reason after reason to support my right-wingedness and I could out-argue any Democrat I came in contact with.  Then, one day, things started to change.

I hate to narrow this change down to a single moment because I think it had been a long time coming.  But, to make a longer life-story shorter, when I started reading The Great Awakening by Jim Wallis I was a confident, learned Republican.  I picked it up (without knowing who Wallis was or what the book was really about) because I was tired of the way the American church operated and the cover seemed like it addressed (and sympathized) with my current state of mind.  As I read, I got angry.  As I read further, I became furious.  “How could someone be so stupid” I thought.  “How could a Christian be so politically liberal?”  But for some reason, I kept reading.

I realized by the end of the book that while my anger was directed at Wallis (the book’s author), it was actually more directed at myself.  My way of thinking.  My way of living.  In the process of being so “right” (or Right), I was forgetting that there’s people behind those politics that Jesus loves and that Jesus cares about, regardless of their situation, their beliefs or their politics.

That’s when I started to see through the lies of the Republican Party.  I never realized before how hateful Right wing politics had become.  It totally neglects people for the benefit of The Free Market and lower taxes.  It says “if you don’t work hard you deserve to be poor and miserable”.  But guess what?  Jesus doesn’t think so.  Poor if it’s your doing, maybe…but miserable and living in deep dark despair?  Absolutely not.  I started to realize that even though the Christians I knew weren’t racist or sexist or thought the poor should suffer, they (and I) were supporting politics and policies that were exactly those things.  So, I knew I had to move away from that Right Wing.

So, did I become a Democrat?  Absolutely not.  In my years as a Republican, I saw all the problems with the Democratic party…so that part didn’t take any research.  I now understood why the Left Wing took many of it’s positions on issues (out of compassion for the poor, the minorities, those who are up against the world every day) and I agreed, in principal, with much of what they said. The problem was, it was still politics. It was still a game that they needed to win to stay in power.  They still took advantage of the average American to stay in power, which in the end, was their goal much more than helping those in need.

So there I was.  Searching for a systematic political structure to fit into.  Systematic living was the easy choice when it came to politics but it was the wrong choice. I could be a Republican or a Democrat (or one of the many other fringe parties) but none of my choices were fully right.  Politics (and the parties) could never be completely compatible with who Jesus wanted me to be.

These days I find that it’s really hard to willfully exist outside the political system (just as it’s always hard to exist outside of systematic living).  My Republican friends think I’m a baby-killing Democrat and my Democratic friends think I’m a cold-hearted Republican.  But this is where we all should be living. (I don’t usually presume that everyone should make the same choices I have, but I’m 99% sure that this is exactly where all people should be, or at the very least, where all Christians should be).  I’ve clearly seen both sides and I truly believe much of what they say is right (while much is wrong), and I think that anyone who buys into either fully is an unthinking systematic pawn.

Every time I talk with a Christian Republican and I hear the party-line being spit back at me, all I can see is their ignorance.  They’ve been hoodwinked by the Republican party into supporting Right Wing views because they’ve been convinced that it’s the “Christian party” to belong to. I don’t try and convince them otherwise, because I know that for me it truly took God’s intervention (through many experiences and one tough book) to help me see Truth.  I couldn’t possibly presume that a few words from me could change any minds.

At the same time, every time I talk to a hard-core Democrat (Christian or otherwise) I know that they’ve been fooled into thinking that the Democratic party actually cares about the poor and the downtrodden.  If they’re Christian, they’re often the “cool” Christian who thinks that being a Democrat makes Faith look “hip” to their Democratic posse, which is just as foolish as thinking tattoos or a pierced-nosed follower of Jesus will make Christianity seem less lame.  I let them be as well…there’s no out-arguing ‘hip’.  There’s no convincing them that Democratic leaders only really care about staying in power and are using the poor to keep themselves there.

Buying into any part of this system is counter to who Jesus wants me to be. Sure, we should vote.  We should be involved in the political process (it’s our duty as a citizen) but the second we identify ourselves as a Democrat or Republican, we’ve lost.  We’ve declared ourselves slaves to the systematic politcs that is so sick and clueless when it comes to real people and real issues.

So, next time you’re talking to me about politics, don’t expect me to take either side.  I refuse. I’ll support the individual issues and people that seem like their the most competent to keep our country functional.  So, I’ll see you at the voting booth, but know that I’ll be checking more than one big party-affiliated box on that voting form…I’ll have done my research and will be voting outside the system of brainless and easy politics.

"Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

In this first post in a series on Systematic Living, I’m going to, more than once, tackle the issue of the stuff we put in our mouths (for most of us, that’s food).  What we eat in America (and much of the Westernized world) is one of the most systematic things I can think of, and it seems that no one (including myself until a couple months ago) noticed.  We thought we were in control of our own choices.  We thought Americans had the most varied diet of anyone in the world, afterall, we have 45,000 product in our grocery stores, who else has that?

If you recognize where the previous line of argument is going, you’ll see that this new popular thinking stems much from the writings of Michael Pollan, which is so cliché I’m almost ashamed to admit that I’ve read everything he’s written (almost…).  Pollan is the gold standard in the analysis of this current systematic food system we’re a part of, pointing out that most of that vast variety of 45,000 products in our stores are actual reconstructions of a single ingredient (which will go unmentioned here to avoid some clichés).  The bottom line is, we eat like crap in this country and one of the main reasons is because we don’t look at human history or culture for clues on what we should be eating. Instead, we consciously (or unconsciously) listen to food companies, trends and fads, and most of all….Diets.

In the past, when I’ve talked with people about my “diet”, they immediately (in their minds) use the modern definition when I mean it in the most traditional way.  The modern definition of diet is commonly thought of as:

Of or relating to a food regimen designed to promote weight loss in a person or an animal

The problem is, this definition of ‘diet’ didn’t exist until fairly recently.  The traditional meaning of diet is simply “what I eat on a regular basis”.  As in “I tend to eat a healthy diet”.  So, how does all of this fit into systematic living?

I think one of the reasons we eat such a horrible diet in this country is because we systematize what we eat. None of us feel qualified to actually make decisions about what is healthy for us and what is not.  We feel like there’s SO much variety out there that we need to be a food scientist to determine what we should be stuffing down our gullet.  So, because of this, we prescribe ourselves to the modern definition of “diets”.  We listen to what Dr. Atkins has to say or we read the latest Low Fat publication in order to find out what’s good for us to be eating.  The stupid part is, we KNOW what’s good for us to be eating…it’s so obvious that we miss it.  Let’s do a little test:

If I want to eat something that’s good for me, that keeps my weight down, that gives me energy and that generally keeps me healthy, which should I grab?
A) A piece of fruit  or
B) absolutely anything out of a prepackaged box (seriously, pick anything).
If I want to feel good, stay slim and fit should I eat pounds upon pounds of meat avoiding any vegetable that’s an ‘evil carb’?  Or, should I eat a balance of meat, fresh veggies, a little grain, and a small amount of fruits?

My point is, it’s not that hard. Modern diets (and almost all popular health fads) are attempting to do one thing:  Give us a way not to eat vegetables (while putting money in their pockets).  Think about it…eating plants is one of the most healthy things we can do, yet it’s the one thing we try and avoid at all costs.  The Food Industry knows this, so they try and come up with every way possible for you to be ‘healthy’ eating their boxed products (don’t get me started on the stupid health claims on processed foods) when what you should be doing is grabbing a carrot.

In the end, “diets” are a symptom of a culture that
1) doesn’t want to eat vegetables
2) has been made insecure, thinking they don’t know what’s healthy, and
3) is too lazy to go to a farmer’s market on Saturdays or too cheap to buy fresh fruit instead of fruit-bars.
It’s a system that’s been imposed on us and most people accept it as fact…something they have to live within.  And that’s crazy.

So, to live outside the system means to stop eating what diet books and Food Inc. tells you to. Instead, ask yourself “would my great-great grandmother recognize this as food?”.  If it’s in a box or tube, she wouldn’t.  If you know it’s healthy, eat it.  If the box tells you it’s healthy…grab something that doesn’t come in a box.

The best source I’ve found for people that understand this are not nutritionists, not diet gurus…but chefs. The really good chefs will never tell you to use anything out of a box or can or bag.  They’ll demand only fresh ingredients from the garden, local farmer, or produce section, which is what you should be eating anyway.  Pick up a cookbook, plant a garden, and get yourself out of this dumbed down, systematic way of eating.  Forget “diets” and develop a “diet” that our ancestors would recognize.