Oddities

“Free” and the Destruction of Worth

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It's free!It takes time to prepare a bid on a project. Time is money. You make no money preparing bids. A bid is simply a hope for a future realization of money.

I don’t think the man requesting bids on one particular project was a bad person. He simply was misinformed. Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing by submitting his project in a public forum. Maybe he was the smartest person in the forum.

The bid to write that 250-page technical manual was won by someone bidding $99.

I remember one bid where it would not have been outrageous to expect $30,000, but only $2,500 was budgeted by the offerer.

I saw a writing job offered recently that sought a writer to compose 10 children’s books. The offer was $50. Not per book, but for all 10.

And newspapers are fighting to stay alive because their revenue model keeps taking hits.

Everywhere I turn, the quality of writing has gone down. Not because people can’t write a decent sentence, but because the writing contains so few ideas of worth. It possesses no depth. It exists to occupy space on a page. Whether that page is digital or print doesn’t matter. I read the words, and they vanish from my head as swiftly as they entered, a nonstop stream of gruel.

Everyone is a writer, and yet so few truly are.

Free is to blame.

People have fallen in love with free. Open source software. Free. Internet advertising. Free. Information delivery systems. Free.

When I first started my business, I got regular calls from the Yellow Pages seeking my listing. They don’t call anymore because you can list your business for free in multiple outlets that will drive far more business to your storefront.

But, of course, more and more of that business is expecting something for free. Or darned near close to it.

Free has come to dominate how we think. In an article on unexpected trends, I read that free is killing the industry that dominates the Internet: pornography. We even want our vices free.

Don’t we get a little touchy when we can’t get something we want for free? Or a perk for free along with that paid item? Something. Anything.

That I’m using WordPress to compose this missive and power this blog is not lost on me. How WordPress makes money for Automattic is.

Free.

I think the Church is struggling with free. Most of what the Church does is free and always has been. Someone to be there by the bedside of a sick member. The dinner delivered to the family with the new baby. The Men’s Group oil change for the single moms. All free.

The struggle?

Now that we live in a world where free is expected, something terrible happened to worth.

When a company expects a writer to churn out 10 children’s books for $50, the underlying truth is those books have no worth. It is not a far stretch to consider that the writer of those books doesn’t have much worth either.

Did I mention that it was a Christian company behind that children’s book project?

What the Church offered for free once had immeasurable worth. We Christians saw how much effort went into offering to others our time and effort.

Now it seems that few consider what goes into the service we render to others. Like so many things that are now free, the inherent worth of that service and the people who give it is lost and forgotten.

Free isn’t so much appreciated as it is expected. And once it becomes an expectation, it becomes harder to see its value.

I believe that many people today cannot see the value of the little aspects of Faith in Jesus and the life we live as a Body because free has reduced their perceived worth to zero.

We do not gather together daily as the Church once did because we no longer comprehend the ROI.

We do not appreciate the authenticity of ritual because ritual is free and therefore easy and next to worthless.

We do not ponder the lives of others because human life is cheap in the eyes of the world.

Jesus is free, and so are eternal life and the fellowship of Faith.

Is it any wonder then that so few people grasp that trio’s infinite worth?

The Nonsense of Life

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Jackson Pollack, "Number 8"Recently, I spoke with a peer who is a dedicated educator. He is going blind rapidly. This will end his career and render him disabled.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

I am 50 years old. At an age when I should be awash in wisdom, most of life makes little sense. I don’t understand why some people prosper and others don’t, even when both take the same course to success. I don’t understand why some people get handed insanely difficult burdens that leave them perpetually struggling to keep that burden from crushing them. I don’t understand how people can work for years toward a goal that seems blessed and then overnight it blows up and leaves lasting wreckage.

Perhaps I am admitting my own folly, but I just don’t understand.

Not understanding is not the same as not having an explanation. I can tell you from a theological perspective what the explanations might be. I know how living in a sin-filled world works. I get the sovereignty of God. I can call up chapter and verse. I can answer you with logic and “wisdom.”

But that doesn’t mean I understand.

The title of this post is “The Nonsense of Life.” And indeed, despite being a Christian of many years, I still find life to be nonsensical. Again, this does not mean there is no sense in it at all, only that I am unable to comprehend it.

God says that His thoughts are far higher than mine. For this reason, they appear as nonsense to me. Like the directions for building a complex microprocessor, one paragraph in Finnish, the next in Hungarian, finishing in base 3. It reads like gibberish because I don’t have what it takes to understand.

Tragedies reverberate through time, the ripples spreading out and colliding with other ripples, both good and ill. Some cancel out, while others amplify.

I know another teacher, many years ago, who had saved most of her career to go on a year-long cruise around the world when she retired. Her students were excited for her because she would take that cruise a month after retiring. Yet within a week of getting her gold watch, she died unexpectedly, never having set sail, all that preparation and hope wasted.

Why? I can’t tell you. I’m sure another teacher in another place at another time DID take a similar cruise. Sure I can offer theories, and perhaps they have some element of wisdom, but in the end, they won’t be any more enlightening as to why one took that cruise and the other never made it.

Sometimes, I think the worst thing we can do is try to explain. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is show up and be available for the ones left behind, the ones with questions we would be foolish to answer.

I am a Christian because no other way offers the same truth. No other way explains life more thoroughly. All the other options are meaningless in the long run.

I wish I could say that being a Christian has answered all my questions, but that would be a lie. If anything, I have more questions the older I get, and the answers I defended so vigorously as a younger man are less crystal clear today.

One day, I will understand. Until then, there is the nonsense of life.

How Being Rapture-Minded Made the American Church No Earthly Good

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The Rapture--Comic book styleI started to write a clever post today on eschatology, with a setup piece of fiction about a U-Boat sinking a merchant marine ship in WWII and the merchant marine ship’s  first mate running around deck yelling, “I’m going to be rescued now, I’ll get a new ship, and I’ll be made captain!” but I just ran out of steam. Perhaps I’m weary from the mentality a good chunk of the modern American Church displays on the End Times. (A decent PDF chart of the major eschatological views.)

The prevailing view of The End among most Christians in the United States is dispensationalism. If you’re familiar with the Left Behind series of books, movies, and licensed products, you know dispensationalism. You may also have heard of it through the book The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, which popularized the view. (And let me add, that if you have read LGPE, you’re probably a geezer, just like yours truly.)

The key pieces of dispensationalism: two distinct histories for the Church and Israel, including post-Second Advent of Christ; a removal of the Church from the earth (the Rapture—see 1 Thessalonians 4) before seven years of horrific tribulation; the Second Advent and 1,000-year Reign of Christ; the Revolt of the Nations; and the Final Judgment.

I wrote a paper in college debunking dispensationalism, but of all the things that bothered me about that view, two stick out: its youth and its presumption.

Dispensationalism as a formal Christian eschatology had no real traction until the 19th century, and it was then popularized by one man. A Christian theology that doesn’t appear until the 19th century pretty much insist that everyone who lived before that era was a moron when it came to understanding The End. This includes the folks who built the early Church, because they didn’t hold to a dispensationalist view. Nor did the great Protestant Reformers.

And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, when an idea starts with one man and no one else, it’s worth scrutinizing, since individuals have a strong penchant to get things wrong. And if we’re going to rejigger how the entire Church views The End, getting it wrong isn’t an option.

Part of that presumption that sticks most in my craw is the idea that the Church will be removed from the earth before the real craziness starts. Most eschatological views support the idea that the Church will be “caught up” to meet Jesus. When is the big distinction between theories, with How being secondary.

When I read the Bible, it seems clear to me that in all of human history, God never removed those who believe in Him from pain, persecution, and the fallout of a fallen world. Lot endured Sodom. Joseph lived through the famine. Joshua wandered the desert with his people. The righteous Jews went into captivity in Babylon. The faithful disciples and apostles were martyred. Time and again, the faithful went through the mess everyone else did.

Where they differed from the rest was in how they dealt with it. Faithfully. And with longsuffering.

And yet one of the hallmarks of dispensationalism is the idea that all the Christians will be removed from the planet before the real End Times suffering comes. That seems out of character with everything the Bible shows us about patient endurance in hard times.

Some Christians who follow a preterist eschatology will argue the genuine nastiness envisioned in the Bible happened in AD 70 already, and all this talk of future tribulation is a waste of time.

Maybe.

Regardless, dispensationalism is the predominant eschatology in today’s American Church, and it drives much of how we live.

We base our Christian theology on it.

We base our American politics on it.

We base our American foreign policy on it.

We base our American economy on it.

We base our American environmental policy on it.

We base our American lifestyles on it.

We base our Christian practice on it.

And the major mentality we espouse when we hold to a dispensational view of The End is…

It’s all going to burn,

And I’m out of here anyway.

When I look around at today’s Church in America, I see that mindset. There’s a sense that there’s no need to try to fix the Church and its problems because, hey, “It’s all going to burn, and I’m out of here anyway.”

Doesn’t matter what the issue is. Why steward the earth if God’s going to burn it up anyway? Why prepare our churches to help meet the needs of those caught up in persecution and tribulation if Christians won’t be here to do it? Why do anything that requires bold effort and genuine sacrifice if you’re just floating along before Jesus comes by with His Gospel Ship and you sail away together?

There’s a nihilism there. Can you see it? When we resign ourselves to checking out before the actual checkout, we miss whatever it is that happens before then. We forgo the opportunity to be useful.

As long as Christians have mentally checked out of the world as it is today, I think the Church will be ineffective with whatever time we have left. And it may be that instead of the 10 years some may think we have, we’re due for another 1,000 yet. How long doesn’t matter. A Church that has its Rapture bags already packed is just waiting around, killing time.

I don’t see how any of that is Biblical or even remotely Christian, though.