“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?

Question

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Between the silence of the mountains
And the crashing of the sea
There lies a land I once lived in
And she’s waiting there for me
But in the grey of the morning
My mind becomes confused
Between the dead and the sleeping
And the road that I must choose

I’m looking for someone to change my life
I’m looking for a miracle in my life
And if you could see what it’s done to me
To lose the love I knew
Could safely lead me to
The land that I once knew
To learn as we grow old
The secrets of our soul

–Excerpt from “Question” by The Moody Blues

 

In searching for some factoid last week, I stumbled into a piece about The Moody Blues and their top songs, one of which is “Question” (shown in the excellent video above).

I always liked that song. The plaintiveness of the question that erupts from the heart of the singer resonates.

Many people are looking at life right now and asking how it is we are where we are. Beyond the questions that afflict us all comes that one individual query, the one that haunts a lot of us who scout our personal situations and ask what happened to that place of refuge and hope from long ago, that “land that I once knew.”

I turn 50 in a few weeks, and I guess that’s good enough time as any to get introspective. Now more than ever, I run into fellow travelers paralyzed by the search for the land they once knew, for someone to change their lives, for some miracle to happen that will forever alter the inevitability of the road they find themselves on, the road that winds through the grey mists of morning that lead into forgetfulness and loss.

How is it that some people seem to find their mission and fulfill it, while other people look and look and yet the road never makes itself clear?

How is it that some people can clearly see where they have come from and where they are going, yet they never quite get to their destination?

How is it that some people find the opposition to their entire journey so strong that it never truly begins?

Where the trouble for me begins is that I know a lot of Christians who are stuck in these No Man’s Land locations. For whatever reason, they’ve been sidelined. All those things they hoped to do now seem less likely than ever. The vision that lit up their early lives now flickers, a cooling ember inside a broken heart. You can see that cool nostalgia in their eyes and hear the tremor in their voices when they tell their stories, especially when they reflect on what might have been.

Some wonder how it was that they had a yearning for foreign missions, yet every opportunity to do those missions blew up or met with seemingly pointless resistance.

Some wanted nothing more than to work with young people, yet the vicissitudes of life kept pulling them away, and now they no longer understand youth.

Some wanted to change the world for Christ, yet they got drawn into the embrace of the American Dream and saw their youth and enthusiasm sucked dry by it.

And some reflect on it all and wonder if they are the ones who put their hands to the plow but then looked back. And they wonder if there is any redemption for that very human failing, a second chance, a ticket back to that land they once knew, where they could start again and do it all right this time.

I think there are a lot of people who found that Someone who changed their life. And yet the finding somehow didn’t shield them from broken hopes and dreams, especially when those hopes and dreams were to be all they could be for that Someone.

There is no joy being caught in that time of discernment yet unable to tell the difference between the dead and the sleeping.  When the road we take from here seems obscured. I don’t know what to say to people when I see them struggling to find how to move on when there appears to be no place to move to. I hope that whatever words come out of my mouth have some of God’s life in them, but I don’t know myself how to answer the questions of how one finds himself here, because I’m not so sure of my own location.

At this point in my life, I wonder about systems and how people end up mired in them. Government, institutional religion, personal expectations, other people’s expectations– they seem to conspire to cloud rather than clarify. And the “land that I once knew” seems farther off than ever.

What do you do when you tried to do everything right by God and yet it led to this far off place that feels so alien and removed from where you think you should be?

I wish I had an answer to that question. I wonder if it lies back in that land we once lived in, but I don’t know how we get back there.

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See also:

Elusive Grace

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Okay, so I admit it.

I’m the kind of guy who likes the one item on the restaurant menu that no one else orders.

I’m the kind of guy who when faced with a daily drive from point A to point B attempts to find a different route between those two points every time.

I’m the kind of guy who gave up on self-help books years ago because I never fit into any of the categories the author would use to illustrate solutions.

I’m pretty much always the odd man out. The contrarian. The iconoclast. The weirdo.

When people find out that I write speculative fiction and then discover that I’ve never read through The Lord of the Rings books because I found them dull, well my weirdness takes on new levels.

That said, I did enjoy the Rings movies. And again, being the weirdo, I definitely thought The Two Towers was the best of the three. My reasoning is that I found the most biblical imagery in the second film.

When Gandalf tells Aragorn to look up when things appear most desperate and expect to see him at a certain hour, I could not help but think of this passage:

And the mind of the king of Syria was greatly troubled because of this thing, and he called his servants and said to them, “Will you not show me who of us is for the king of Israel?” And one of his servants said, “None, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom.” And he said, “Go and see where he is, that I may send and seize him.” It was told him, “Behold, he is in Dothan.” So he sent there horses and chariots and a great army, and they came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
—2 Kings 6:11-17

At the bleakest moment in the battle at Helm’s Deep, Aragorn, remembering Gandalf’s words, looks to the rim of the valley and sees it lined with a vast army headed by Gandalf.

At the bleakest moment, a sign of hope. The very presence of grace. Once doomed, now saved.

How many Westerns made their money by sending the cavalry over the hill to rescue the beleaguered heroes pinned down by the relentless tide of opposition? 'Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains' by Frederick RemingtonThe trumpet cry as the rescuers spurred on their chargers. The enemy routed.

Grace, all of it.

You would think, then, that in a country that bills itself as a Christian nation, in a land steeped in the last desperate stand before the cavalry arrives, that we would be drowning in grace as a people. You would think that our whole lives would be devoted to dispensing grace as often and to as many as we can.

You would think.

I spent most of the evening thinking about this disconnect. How is it that grace is so elusive in the United States? What is it about us that we can’t resist the spectacle of watching another human being go down in flames? How can it be that their ultimate fate means so little to us?

Most of you know that the foreclosure rate in this country is running about three times higher than normal. Where I live, the number of abandoned houses—those fled by their owners, no “For Sale” sign in the front yard, no realtor in sight—borders on the epidemic.

We as Christians may talk about grace, but if we want a painful example of how out of touch we are concerning grace, the very lifeblood of the Church, look no further than those families who lost their homes. How is it that those families seem to vanish into the ether, melting away to nothing like hoarfrost assaulted by hot breath? Where do they go?

It saddens me that I don’t know. All I do know is that they were in trouble and no one was there for them in the midst of it. All the potential in the world for Christians to step in and demonstrate grace, yet it never came to be. And now, as if sucked into that mysterious realm where singleton socks go, that family is gone. Sometimes they don’t even bother to shut the door behind them.

And we who are wise can pontificate about why they failed. We can talk about greed. We can talk about poor choices. We can talk about moral failures. We can blame it on the times, the media, the economy, the war, the peace, the current president, the next president—heck, we can talk for whole years at a time, but none of our talk reveals bare naked grace to the ones who need it most.

Is anyone besides me grieved by this? Is anyone else hounded by our lack of care, our inability to somehow take the grace we might have been shown in the past and minister it to someone in desperate need?

How is it that we hate failure in other people, yet we expect others to feel for us when we go down in flames?

There’s not a person reading this now who is not excruciatingly close to losing it all. Do we realize how readily our carefully crafted lifestyles can go to pieces in a matter of weeks? One bad investment. One miscalculation at work. One illness. Poof, and its all gone.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how healthy, how wealthy, how prepared, or how risk averse. When that time comes, it comes. You’ll need that grace. You’ll need someone to love you no matter how shattered you might be, someone who can minister the grace of Jesus Christ to you.

Now what if there’s no one there?

We all have to be the cavalry at some point in life. We all have to ride into the flaming arrows, the poison darts, the thick haze of flying lead. Because there’s no way anyone’s going to be our cavalry when we need it if we were never there for them.