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I am not remotely an expert on healthcare.  Truth be told, I’ve also not followed the news on Obama’s health care plan the last few days because I’m tired of the noise.  However, I feel this should be said:

If someone criticizes an aspect of (or the entirety of) the proposed health care plan, it does not necessarily follow that said person hates humanity, does not believe people should have health care coverage, isn’t following Jesus, and/or is a racist, unthinking moron.  Maybe they hold to many of the same values as the people in favor of the healthcare plan and simply differ on the best way to reach it.

I should also add that calling those in favor of the health plan radical socialists, bleeding-heart liberals and/or encouraging them to move to Canada is not particularly helpful, either.

If we think about the long-term effects of such a plan, it’s in everyone’s best interest to debate this issue with every bit of passion we have, and with every opinion, thought and idea on the table.  It would also be incredibly helpful if we could remember our manners.  Conviction and tact are not incompatible.

Sadly enough, summer is drawing to a close, and my mind is beginning to gear up for the schoolyear.   It’s been a great one so far, and I plan on milking these last few weeks for all they’re worth.  Mostly I’m thankful that this summer, my children experienced something wonderful.   They were bored.  Sure, we had a lovely vacation, and we’ve been to the pool and have had get-togethers with friends.  But most days, we’ve been here, hanging out at the house in our PJs well into the afternoon with no particular place to go.  

Those first few weeks were brutal, to be sure; the “transition” period of remembering how to be around your sibling all day every day can be a painfully exasperating task.  Those weeks also included a seemingly unending chorus of “Mo-om!  We don’t know what to do!”   They were always annoyed with my overly-chipper answer.  “How wonderful!  You are facing an empty canvas of possibilities!  What COULD you do?!!  How very fun!  I wonder what you will decide!”  (Eyes rolling my direction.)  But then, just as I was about to doubt the benefits of boredom and sign them up for seventy-eight camps, we made it over the hump of early-summer-exasperation… and the magic kicked in.  You know what magic I’m talking about- it’s the same kind of magic that made your own summers so memorable, when  you and your best friend would pretend to be Nancy Drew and ride around the neighborhood on your bikes with your trusty notebooks solving mysteries, or that time you and your brother converted the new refrigerator box into the Millenium Falcon.  

The last two months my kids made hand puppets and bookmarks and even laptops out of cardstock, they built forts and ships and space rockets out of pillows, they held a rather extensively planned doggie day care for our dog Baxter, much to his chagrin.  They went on approximately 47, 382 treasure hunts, each with stunning results.  (“I LOVE this blue floppy piece of felt!  Awesome!”)  They saved the world from the bad guys at least once a day throughout the month of July, often wearing velcro Superman and Batman capes for added flair.  One day, they dressed up as Mario and Luigi and spent the entire day pretending that our house was the Super Mario Galaxy.  (I think at some point they attempted to spin poor Baxter like a turtle, which may have been the low point of his summer.) 

I’m not sure they will share those things in a few weeks when someone asks what they did this summer.  They’ll probably say they went to the beach and got to go to the museums in New York City.  But when they get older, I hope they’ll remember the magic of a summer filled with empty days and the gift of boredom, and remember that time they sailed across the ocean on a big pillow toward an enchanted island.  That’s the part I’ll remember most fondly.

My friend Dallas alerted me to this Op-Ed piece in the New York Times written by Nicholas Kristof, where he asks this compelling question:  ”If the G-8 leaders are so willing to save one child, why are they collectively so far behind in meeting humanitarian aid pledges to save other children?”

Those of us with friends in nonprofit sectors will find much of this old news.  My friend Brad will tell you that if you want people to give to your cause, you have to make it personal, and you have to show them that they are making a very concrete difference.  This is not always a bad thing.  For instance, I’ve found a number of teaching moments with my children thanks to the magnet photograph we have on our refrigerator of the children we sponsor through ServLife International.  I find less compelling reasons for grown adults who could easily pick up a book or in a matter of seconds pull up a host of  Internet articles about global poverty.  The argument that we have to help adults feel good in order to get them to act brings to mind something akin to dressing up broccoli with cheese tops and zooming it into their mouths with airplane noises.

I suppose I could get over that easily enough.  As Kristof argues, we probably could fix much of this problem by simply revisiting the marketing issue with at least the same amount of energy we use when selling toothpaste.  I’m sure some PR firm somewhere is more than happy to dress up like a stalk of broccoli for the right price (even if that price is looking charitable, God help us).  The more compelling question to me is–Why do we have such a lack of empathy when true crisis confronts us?

A group of us at Journey are currently reading through Jurgen Moltmann’s A Theology of Hope every Tuesday night, so I am once again pondering the great and central role that hope plays in our lives.  For Moltmann, eschatological hope is the very essence of being Christian.  It is that which allows us to live into the dynamic future of God, always open to new possibilities.  As I read this article, I couldn’t help but wonder if our sudden attack of empathy-loss when confronted with the staggering number of children that die of malnutrition every day is not an issue of “feel good” but rather a lack of eschatological hope.  We do not feel paralyzed because we cannot find a way to put human faces on the numbers, but because we can no longer imagine making a difference.  We give up, because we become convinced that it is a lost cause.

I remember a number of years ago when reading Ronald Sider’s book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger he mentions a number of popular Christian excuses.  The one I found most puzzling was the tactic of quoting Mark 14:7, “The poor you will have with you always.”  Apparently, some believe that  Jesus  relinquished us from the responsibility of working toward eradicating poverty, since Jesus already said we wouldn’t be successful.  The early church hardly interpreted it this way, as the first few hundred  years of Christianity boasts stories of such radical giving  that even pagan historians of the time were compelled by them.  And in the broader context of Scripture, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who could argue the case that God’s command to care for the poor is not primary.   And yet, something about us- at least as Americans, if not simply as humans- zones in on the loophole and finds it acceptable to gloss over the very real call of Jesus to make a significant difference in this world.  It is a lost cause, we say.  Jesus even said so.

But if these are lost causes–these issues of global poverty and malnutrition and infant mortality and malaria outbreaks and prenatal care for women and proper education-if these are lost causes,  how can we claim to have faith in a God who promises to wipe every tear away?  How can we hold any sort of belief in a Kingdom where God will be all in all?

If we find our eyes glossing over and our hearts turning numb when we hear the very real statistics of those in the Two-Thirds World, it is not because we lack “feelgood,” lest we let ourselves off the hook far too easily.  It is because we lack faith in the God we worship, and we have lost all transformative hope in the promise God has surely given us.