Dare to be a Daniel

This is a guest post written by my husband Andrew, my very favorite Anabaptist.

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I went to a religious school, which meant that between music classes, and Sunday school, I learned a lot of Christian children’s songs.  This past weekend, watching Twitter, Facebook, and TV, one of the ones we sang all the time kept running through my mind.  I will put the words of the chorus here:

Dare to be a Daniel.

Dare to stand alone.

Dare to have a purpose firm.

Dare to make it known.  

Every Christian kid knows the story of Daniel and the Lion’s den.  Daniel, an upright, God-fearing man is in a foreign country, serving a foreign king.  Despite all this pressure to fit in, to go along to get along, Daniel remains true to his God.  The king puts out a decree (tricked by those who hate Daniel) that anyone who prays or worships anything but the King for the next 30 days will be cast into a den of Lions.

Daniel ignores the decree, and continues to pray in front of an open window that faces Jerusalem, where his home and heart truly is.  Those who set this trap for him turn him in, and the king is forced to cast Daniel into the den of lions.  But God shuts the Lions’ mouths and Daniel emerges unharmed.

Its rare we get a modern example of a Biblical model as close as we got last Sunday.  We had a “king,” who declared that those who would not honor an idol made of cloth were sons of bitches who deserved to lose their jobs.  We had multiple Daniels, who chose to honor their principles and beliefs rather than obey their king.

And we had an audience, watching what was happening from home.

I realize a lot of my Christian brothers and sisters are going to argue that Kaepernick shouldn’t be slotted into the Daniel role and respectfully, I disagree.  While Kaepernick may not have made his protest an act of worship, he was kneeling for an important Biblical principle: the rights and equality of all people before their country and their God.  The fact that Christians would claim they believe in that principle, then vilify Kaepernick for using his platform to stand for it is terrible.

Christians need to recognize that blind nationalism is an idol, and just because it is a flag and not a statue we worship, it makes us no less guilty.  The Bible says that we are strangers in a foreign land that is not our own.  We cannot allow ourselves to buy into the story our nation tells us about ourselves.  Our first loyalty isn’t to a flag or a statue or a nation.  Our first loyalty is to a Kingdom, and its principles should animate our actions.

It’s telling that up until this Sunday, it was only black athletes who chosen to kneel on the NFL field.  It’s also telling that only one owner joined his players in kneeling yesterday.  That owner was an immigrant as well.  Christians must open their ears  to the stories of those who do not walk the same path as us.  If they are showing us that something has become an idol, then we need to take that very seriously.  

We also need to view this as an opportunity to demonstrate to our children both the strength it takes to stand up for right, and the potential cost.  When power blusters and threatens, the image of a man or woman on their knees is a powerful example for the next generation of what it really means to belong to a kingdom.  We tell our kids that they need to emulate these Biblical examples, and we now have an opportunity to put our words into action.  

As for me, I will be on my knees Sunday, and I hope you will too.  

The Politics of Being Poor

I’m going to use this space today to write about something that I don’t often talk about, and that’s the fact that we are poor.

Our children qualify for Medicaid, which pays for their check-ups, vaccinations and dental care. They qualify for free breakfast at school and a reduced fee lunch. My youngest would qualify for WIC checks, which is a resource we’ve used in the past. We receive a federal subsidy under the Affordable Care Act, which helps my husband and I afford health insurance for ourselves.

We don’t think about often, because we don’t feel poor. We can pay our bills (most of the time). We have two cars that run (most of the time). We bought a house last year, with a little help from our families. I can even work part-time for a non-profit, because a relative helps out with childcare.

We are the Luckiest Kind of Poor People, the kind with wealthier family members who pass down furniture and appliances to us. We go to the beach every year because someone else pays for our lodging. We can afford to eat out now and then and maintain a couple of streaming subscriptions for entertainment. Life is pretty good.

We also don’t spend a lot of time talking about being poor, because, well, it’s embarrassing. There’s a stigma associated with being poor, the constant implication that you’re just not trying hard enough.

Americans have a long history of associated prosperity with virtue, which is why most us pretend to be more affluent then we actually are.

And there is certainly no end of people who will tell you that you just need to do X or give up Y, but the reality is that financial situations are complex and the path upward isn’t always straight.

This is the irony of the world we live in now: I have a device that can access the internet, make calls, stream TV, and instantly translate hundreds of languages, and this device fits in my pocket and I can buy one for less than the cost of a doctor’s appointment. Think about that for a moment.

So when social welfare issues hit the national spotlight, there’s this funny thing that happens where I look around and realize that this is just an “issue” for a lot of people. It’s an abstract concept that has no actual effect on their lives.

And a lot of them have been told, over and over again, that world is full of greedy, entitled poor people who are scamming the system, and the best way to stop that is not to fix social welfare programs, but to reduce funding for them.

If the government cuts back the free and reduced lunch program so that fewer families are covered, that has a direct effect on our grocery budget every month. And as I said, we are the Luckiest Kind of Poor People. Our kids won’t go hungry. They might not eat as well and they won’t get milk every day, but they won’t go hungry.

That’s not the case for every family.

Children have no control over their household income or stability. They have no control over the family budget. I can’t imagine what people think would be resolved or improved by letting children go hungry.

The larger, looming issue for us these days is health care. I’ve had a stomachache since November wondering what was going to happen to our health insurance, and the recent roll out of the health care plan proposed by the Republican party isn’t making me feel any better.

My husband and I have an “Obamacare” plan and have for a number of years. Neither one of us can get insurance from our employers, so the exchange was a perfect solution for us.

Over the past few years we’ve listened and sympathized with people who have been forced to change plans and faced rising premiums. I’ve listened to people complain about the subsidies they don’t qualify for and being forced to pay for services, like maternity or mental health, that they don’t use.

The American healthcare system in general is a lumbering, creaking Frankenstein monster. Obamacare was certainly not a complete solution, but that’s a topic for another day.

Obamacare works for us. Our current plan costs us $209 per month. That’s up $80 a month from last year, which I realize might sound like a very small increase to some of you. We had to cut things from our budget to be able to afford it.

It covers our routine medical costs with a minimal copay. It covers any testing that we need. It provides partial coverage for the medication I take for hypothyroidism.

Without the subsidies provided by the ACA, our plan would cost $674 per month. That’s more than our monthly grocery budget.

Even if we cut our coverage to bare-bones catastrophic, accepted a $5,000 deductible like we used to have and paid for all of our routine medical expenses out of pocket (and by that I mean never go to the doctor, borrow money or put it on a credit card, because there is no room in our budget for insurance AND routine medical costs) we would still struggle to afford $250 or $300 per month. It’s not a matter of cutting X or doing Y, the money just isn’t there.

This is where I’ll probably be getting my thyroid medication from. They seem nice.

And I just want to emphasize, that insurance is only covering the two of us. If our children ever get dropped from Medicaid, we’re up an entirely different kind of creek.

Like millions of Americans, we hope this time in our lives is temporary. We are trying hard. Where we are is not the bottom, it’s a place we scrambled up to.

My husband works full-time and goes to school at night so that someday he’ll be able to get a job with insurance benefits. We know that our kids won’t be little forever and there will be potential for me to work more hours without the expense of daycare.

We have hope for the future.

We hope that someday we won’t need help to pay for insurance. We hope that we’ll be able to pay for our children’s medical care. We hope to reach a place where we can actually put money in our savings account and not take it out two weeks later. We might even someday get to grumble about our taxes!

#GOALS

But for right now, this is where we are. And when you turn on the news and see people in nice suits talking about how people could afford health insurance if they just tried a little harder and cut back and little more, it makes me want to laugh. Not in a happy way.

Every social welfare program in this country has people who being served by it. Real people with real lives, not some mythical lazy stereotype. People who are disabled, people who live with chronic illness, people who were raised in poverty and never made it out.

To ignore us, or to insist that we’re victims of our own irresponsibility is not a solution. It’s a convenient excuse. 

Love before Judgment

It can be hard, in a house with three small children, to have any kind of adult conversation. That’s why when my husband I do manage to talk, these conversations often take place in pieces. A few minutes here, a few minutes there, a handful of texts exchanged during the day.

Often we’ll start a conversation on the way home from church that spans into the week, and this week we’ve been talking about judgment. It started because of something Andrew said in our adult Sunday School class. I might be paraphrasing here, but he said “Jesus started with love. Until I can love someone like Jesus does, I can’t judge them.”

“But…”

Because judgment is one of those topics in faith. We say “well, we can’t judge” as we’re judging someone. We can judge someone for being too judgmental. We can spin it into a slippery slope argument (well, if you can’t judge, how are you supposed to know right from wrong?). It’s very easy for conversations about judgment to get tangled up and go nowhere.

Much like my garden hose.

This is the famous “judge not” verse in the gospel of Matthew (7:1-2, Contemporary English Version):

Don’t condemn others, and God won’t condemn you. God will be as hard on you as you are on others! He will treat you exactly as you treat them.

It’s the second part that always chills me. The NIV version talks about being judged by the same measure, which always makes me picture a scale where all the judgments I’ve made are piled up on one side, dragging the ground.

So here’s a straightforward, unambiguous commandment. Don’t judge. Great. Conversation over.

Except that it’s not, because everyone will invariably respond with, “But what about pedophiles? What about murderers? What about people who throw their trash out of car windows? It’s okay for us to judge them, right?”

I think part of this is a language issue. “Judgment” in our context, is not always a bad thing. I try to exercise good judgment with my money. I weigh a lot of factors before making a large purchase, and I try to make sound decisions that will benefit our household. We call that judgment.

But that’s not what Jesus is referring to in Matthew, which is why I like the CEV better than the NIV. Jesus is talking about condemnation. He’s talking about the human reflex that allows us to rationalize our own flaws while looking down the weaknesses of others.

So can we condemn pedophiles? Murders? Litterbugs?

Andrew and I continued talking about this through the week and this is the answer that he came up with. He said we absolutely can condemn the actions. We can and should condemn the sexual exploitation of children. We can condemn murder. We can condemn littering.

But we can’t condemn the person.

And this is where it really gets tricky, because what does that look like in practice?

Jesus condemned the actions of the money lenders and the people who were economically exploiting others, but when he saw Zacchaeus, a dishonest tax collector, he called out to him and invited him into his presence.

And yes, Zacchaeus repented, but Jesus reached out in love first. It wasn’t conditional. Jesus didn’t say “repent and then I’ll eat with you.”

Of course, Jesus, being Jesus, knew Zacchaeus’ heart. We might reach out in love and never see it followed by repentance. The only repentance schedule we really have any control over is our own.

This is my repentance schedule.

I came across this passage in Romans this week (13:8-10, CEV again):

Let love be your only debt! If you love others, you have done all the Law demands. In the Law there are many commands, such as, “Be faithful in marriage. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not want what belongs to others.”

But all of these are summed up in the command that says, “Love others as much as you love yourself.” No one who loves others will harm them. So love is all that the Law demands.

It’s a shame that “love,” much like “judgment,” is also a word that we can’t seem to agree on the meaning or the application of. I’ve heard many people argue that judgment IS love, and they would want someone to point out their sin if they were the one sinning.

That is, of course, a steaming load of horse manure.

Because there is no “if.” We all have plenty of sin in our lives. And most of us go to the church on Sunday safe in the knowledge that no one will call us out on it.

And that’s what we want, isn’t it? That’s how we want to be treated. We want to be given the benefit of the doubt. We want time and space to work through our issues. We want to be accepted as a flawed, complicated human being.

We want to be loved.

It’s so much easier to accept that grace than it is to give it.

2-Minute Life

Have you heard of the two minute rule? It goes something like this:

If a task takes you less than two minutes to complete, do it now.

Here’s a succinct explanation:

It’s surprising how many things we put off that we could get done in two minutes or less. For example, washing your dishes immediately after your meal, tossing the laundry in the washing machine, taking out the garbage, cleaning up clutter, sending that email, and so on.

It’s one of those things I heard once and it made me laugh. Because this is my life right now:

It’s August. It’s evening and my husband is mowing. I come in from watering the garden, a wet and stinky toddler on my hip. I need to go back out to turn off the water and roll up the hose, and that will be easier to do if my toddler is indoors and not within running distance of the road. It shouldn’t take longer than two minutes.

I quickly wash the toddler’s hands and take off her dirty shoes. I peel off her wet shirt (no pants because it’s August) and change her diaper. She’s fussy and clinging to me. I need to distract her so I can go back outside, so I hunt for the TV remote.

Several minutes later I manage to get a YouTube video on and gather up the dirty diaper and wet clothing. Laundry basket. Diaper pail.

My five year-old comes down the stairs in his flannel pajamas. It’s August, I tell him.

While I’m at the diaper pail I notice the cat’s litter box needs to be cleaned, so I grab a bag and do it.

The YouTube video has ended. On my way back to the living room I step on a goldfish cracker. It shatters into a million orange crumbs. Broom and dustpan.

I look at the clock and realize it’s time for the toddler to have her evening milk. But then the seven year-old wants me to Ask Google what the most venomous snake in the world is.

Ask Google yourself, I tell him, before I rethink the wisdom of letting an internet search engine correctly interpret his question.

The toddler is now watching whatever YouTube decided to play next. I dash outside and turn off the water. I leave the hose laying in the yard and tell myself I’ll get it later.

And that’s my life. One simple, two-minute task takes approximately twenty minutes to complete.

There are hundreds more of those two-minute tasks that won’t get done. I have to prioritize. I have to do two minutes of laundry before I can spare two minutes for the kitchen floor. Oh, wait, it’s lunchtime. Time for two minutes of cutting up grapes and dividing out crackers and baloney.

My life.

I have to text my husband about plans for the weekend, and pay the electric bill. Dentist appointments are overdue. My phone reminds me that I haven’t taken my Words with Friends turn and my grandmother is waiting.

Someone starts crying in the living room and everything gets reshuffled. Time passes so quickly in two-minute increments.