Preparing For The New Economy

The stock mar­ket is on a long slide down right now. The finan­cial econ­omy of the entire world is slow­ing. There have been many com­pany clos­ings and lay­offs — with many to come. The gods of imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion are pay­ing their div­i­dends — as are the “prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers” of indul­gence and irre­spon­si­ble liv­ing. This is the front edge of the era of the old time prophets that are say­ing more loudly, “I told you so.”
Per­son­ally, I take a lit­tle dif­fer­ent tack on all of this. Being a bit of a min­i­mal­ist, I have lived with an eye toward the man whose “econ­omy” was in his char­ac­ter and his real­iza­tion of the brevity and lim­i­ta­tions of phys­i­cal life. He did not waste his young life “grab­bing for all of the gusto” because he knew it to be fleet­ing, and would be noth­ing com­pared to the per­fect era of life after the res­ur­rec­tion.
Church atten­dance trends fol­low the rise and fall of the stock mar­ket, and the eco­nomic trends in gen­eral. Depend­ing on God becomes more mean­ing­ful when depend­ing on our own efforts alone fails. The econ­omy in Jesus’ day included a huge tax sys­tem that was very unfair, col­lected by cheats, and squan­dered by the con­trollers. The hard­est work­ing and the dirt poor were often the same peo­ple. Jesus blessed them. He told para­bles that par­al­leled the use of money, but those para­bles were designed to point peo­ple to the spir­i­tual economies, com­pletely ignored by the greedy world around them. In short, his para­bles about money were not pri­mar­ily about money but some­thing much greater.
Jesus’ econ­omy is gen­er­ous but not indul­gent. He calls all to his table, but expects us to par­tic­i­pate in “ban­quet clothing” — the right liv­ing sup­plied by him. The hum­ble are placed at the head table and the arro­gant are moved to the back row. The ban­quet econ­omy is about love — not egos. It is invari­ably the oppo­site of what we most tend to do.
So, here is what I am doing to pre­pare for the new econ­omy: more grat­i­tude for my daily bread; respect­ing peo­ple as bear­ers of the image of God — not here for my pur­poses but God’s; enjoy­ing nature more; focus­ing bet­ter on qual­ity liv­ing; help­ing oth­ers make the tran­si­tion from the world’s econ­omy to God’s. The bet­ter days ahead are not about the world’s econ­omy turn­ing around some­day, but in peo­ple find­ing each other in the mean time.