At the moment I have just helped prepare a rather large feast, bought a cup of Starbucks, I'm listening to my Dad watch a football game(yes you can listen to someone watching any sports), and I'm curled up on my couch writing to you.
Since I stepped foot outside of Starbucks roughly an hour ago I've been asking myself one thing: Is this all really worth it? Today and tomorrow are days where Americans all celebrate gluttony. Today we eat drink and be merry, and tomorrow we waste our paychecks on thousands of dollars worth of items that we don't need. Well I take that back, sometimes we do actually need a warm coat for this winter weather. We spend and we eat to our hearts content. All the while the vast majority of the world sits at our doorstep staring at us enviously.
Why do I participate in it? Simply put, I don't know how not to. I was born into a middle class family. Life for me was spent worrying about things like 'what clothes I shall wear tomorrow?' 'does that girl think I'm cute?' 'where do I want to go out to eat?' All the while I am staring at the figures that make up my bank account wondering whether or not I'll be able to maintain the illusion that I'm living the dream perfectly. But I'm not. I haven't lost sleep over the hungary eyes staring at me. I have lost sleep because I am the one sheltered safely on the inside scarfing down as much as I can.
Can I justify my life any longer while I spend my days contemplating the theories of socialism and communism? Can I maintain my composure any longer?
I don't know.
Your theory is not your faith, nor anything like it. Your faith is your obedience; your theory I know not what. Yes, I will gladly leave you without any of what you call faith. Trust in God. Obey the word-every word of the Master. That is faith; and so believing, your opinion will grow out of your true life, and be worthy of it. Peter says the Lord gives the spirit to them that obey him: the spirit of the Master, and that alone, can guide you to any theory that it will be of use to you to hold. A theory arrived at any other way is not worth the time spent on it. Jesus is the creating and saving lord of our intellects as well as of our more precious hearts; nothing that he does not think, is worth thinking; no man can think as he thinks, except he be pure like him; no man can be pure like him, except he go with him, and learn from him.-George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Series III, Justice
"Today, there is an inescapable duty to make ourselves the neighbor of every individual, without exception, and to take positive steps to help a neighbor whom we encounter, whether that neighbor be an elderly person, abandoned by everyone, a foreign worker who suffers the injustice of being despised, a refugee, an illegitimate child wrongly suffering for a sin of which the child is innocent, or a starving human being who awakens our conscience by calling to mind the words of Christ: 'As long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me' (Matthew 25:40)"-St Elizabeth of Hungary
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