As many of you know, there have been about 12 fires in Southern California over the past few days. The San Diego area was hit really hard, and almost a million people have been evacuated from their homes. As a compassionate gesture, several San Diego area hotels have offered discount rates to evacuees. That’s great, right? According to an economics professor, it’s horrific. Mark Steckbeck, economics professor at Hillsdale College, laments the fact that hotels offered discounted rates to fire evacuees in San Diego on this post of his blog, The Liberal Order. According to Steckbeck, who doesn’t sound very liberal despite his blog title, the hotels made a bad thing worse by not charging full market rates or more for the rooms because higher prices would have insured that only the most desperate used the hotel rooms while others would have opted for shelters or family homes. Steckbeck says “It was a nice gesture on the part of the hotels, but I’d rather see compassion administered through the invisible hand of market prices.” Technically he is correct regarding the economics, but he is completely wrong concerning compassion. Market prices are passive. They do what they do, like a machine. Compassion, on the other hand, is active. It cannot be administered by the invisible hand of market prices. It cannot be administered by any passive force. Compassion means to suffer with, and market economics don’t suffer. They don’t feel. They cannot administer justice or mercy. They just are. Compassion is the realm of people. So how does human compassion reconcile itself with market forces? This IS the market. The owners get to charge what they want, and the owners decided to be compassionate. That’s the great thing about the economy and the market. If one is fortunate enough to make one’s riches and own something, one is able to be merciful at will. As for the people who may have been willing to pay more for a room, it doesn’t matter. When almost a million people need to be evacuated, the rooms would have filled up anyway and the compassionate gesture of reducing prices didn’t do any harm at all. What did happen, and what will happen, is that when the fires are over, those who still have homes will return to them and those who need the hotels for longer than a few days because they no longer have homes, will have locked in reduced rates while they look for other semi-permanent housing. The hotels are still more expensive than rent, so some people will rent apartments until the insurance company, FEMA or whoever comes through with money to either buy elsewhere or rebuild. Either way, the hotels in the area were only half booked before this happened and now they are all full, so the hotel owners were able to be compassionate while still making a profit. Isn’t that the best sort of economics?
I’m taking a class at church about the changing culture and our role in it as Christians. Traditonally, Christians treat non-Christians as “others” and try to evangelize them. This class emphasizes finding common ground and building relationships rather than blunt evangelism. In the last session, we had to get into groups and one of us had to ask a difficult question that a non-Christian may really ask, and the others had to answer. My question was basically “See Darfur? How can there be a loving God?” Another guy had a question about why Christians are so non-chalant regarding global warming. Another wondered about death. As we talked about our subjects, I realized something. Crisises of faith are a Godsend.
I know that most Christians would tell you that having a crisis of faith is the worst thing ever. Once you become a Christian, doubting is no longer an option. Just believe God in all things. I get that. It’s comforting. But I have found that I end up closer to God when I allow myself a full-on faith crisis. For instance, I have actually asked God what’s up with Darfur and how could he be loving and allow that to happen. I have even wondered if he was really there at all. Is this world and what we make of it really all there is. Does he see what’s going on there? Does he care? I mean, honestly, I really want to see someone get struck down by lightning over this! I honestly wondered if I could worship someone who could let those things happen.
The thing is, I dared to question my faith and my worship of God because I know that my love for him is a choice. Not that God isn’t worthy of my adoration, but I have to give it freely or it isn’t real. I would rather ask God about Darfur and ask myself if I wanted to worship him with the world being in this state and him letting it happen, than to blindly give my devotion for no apparent reason. I still love God and I have continued to love him through really difficult circumstances. He has promised not to ever leave me, and I plan to stick around with him, too. Oddly enough, my faith crisises force me to reason everything out and account for my faith in a way that blind devotion doesn’t, which ultimately brings me closer to God, not farther away.
So what does this have to do with evangelism? A LOT. When non-Christians ask us questions and we give some pat answer from “Church 101”, they know it’s fake. I think the thing that bothers them about us is not so much that we believe, but that it seems as if we are so bent on the next life that we truly stop caring about this one. It seems as if we don’t think about things like whether the war we are in is just, why things like Darfur happen and what we can do, or whether we should try to stop global warming. I think they would listen to us more if we would actually allow ourselves to ask the question “where is God in all of this” and then allow him to answer. It also helps to admit that we wrestle with that question and that sometimes God doesn’t answer and we just don’t know. Non-Christians are people who don’t believe in Christ. They aren’t stupid. They aren’t children. For the most part, neither are we. We should be able to relate as adults and find some common ground.
You know what? That faith crisis that non-Christians exist in and Christians avoid, where we ask “God, where are you?” is possibly the most common ground of all.
My Bible study group is reading a book called “In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day” by Mark Batterson. His premise is that Christians often play it safe when we should be chasing lions. I was thinking about this regarding the way we pray. I know that we are supposed to be humble and pray God’s will, but sometimes it seems like that is a passive way of praying, like we don’t really believe that God will do what we ask, so we’re giving him an “out”. But God says to come to him boldly. I notice that it seems like when I pray boldly, as in “God. I know you’re my Father and you won’t withhold any good thing from me. This is what I need. I know you will provide”, that my prayers seem more effective. It’s weird. I don’t think I should be ordering God around or anything, but I also think that God wants us to know that he loves us and that his will is for us to be confident of that. We can know God’s character enough to know whether what we pray is in his will or not. Does what we want involve sin? If so, then that is not in God’s will and we have no business asking. But, if what we ask is in God’s nature and fits in with what he has already said he wants ( i.e. a loved one accepting Christ, us being in a position to serve, even prayers that we get married and/or have children), then it seems that we should pray with confidence and boldness. Trust God Chase Lions!
