What Would You Accomplish With Billions of Dollars?

I am watching with great interest the hoopla surrounding the “stimulus package” being offered by the Democrats in our U.S. Congress.  According to Daniel Henninger’s excellent analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal, this American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (just 700 pages of reading) is more a “self” stimulus bill than it is an economic stimulus bill because of how much would be spent on rebuilding the government’s infrastructure.  For example, the boast within the bill that says 3 million jobs will be created fails to clarify that these jobs will all be on our government’s payroll with the federal government as their boss.  Is this economic stimulus?  Sounds sketchy and a bit scary to me.

Whatever happened to zero-based budgeting?  You know, where we figure out what is needed first and then assign a cost.  It seems we have reversed this process to something like, “How much money can we spend or print?” and then let’s start putting everything into categories of spending.  We can’t operate our own homes this way.

I looked over some of the numbers in the stimulus package and have never seen so many zeros in all my life.   There is $6,000,000,000 for the construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings.  How about $375,000,000 to rebuild trails on our Federal lands?  Or we have the Weatherization Assistance Program chiming in at $6,200,000,000.  By the way, what is that $500,000,000 of expenses included within this?  No detail, just half-a-billion dollars of expenses.

Perhaps in contrast, I became aware that Wycliffe Bible Translators launched the Last Languages Campaign.  This campaign focuses on translating the Bible into 2300 languages that remain on their list of people groups without a Bible in their native language.  Bob Creson, President of Wycliffe, gathered their staff together to pray and plan this campaign.  It was fueled by a donor who asked the question, “If I gave you $100,000,000 for your work, what would you accomplish?”  This is cold, hard cash.  The Last Languages Campaign will enable all of these remaining languages to have a translation started by the year 2025.  The price tag is $1,000,000,000 (give or take a few dollars).

This represents billions of dollars that will accomplish something far-reaching on a scope that influences many people groups on the face of the earth.  It is not an “invest in ourselves” mentality like the Democrats are proposing, but rather an “invest in others” plan that will influence untold cultures and societies for the better.  The lesson for us, and for the next generation, is to look at how we invest in others and how we learn to be a conduit for good while we inhabit a short time on the face of this earth.  The present fades away, the eternal endures.  This must become our focus.

A Fresh Perspective on Spending and Giving

“I’ve always said that one of the most boring things to do with money is spend it,” expressed philanthropist Robert Wilson in a recent article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy. I had to check myself on this. After paying the recent round of bills, I realized Mr. Wilson’s statement contained more than an ounce of truth.

Well, what about giving money away? Does it have to be boring? Are my decisions to give filled with joy and anticipation, or with routine angst? As a Christ follower, I would like to suggest that both your spending and giving could be joyous opportunities with a fresh perspective.

The lesson comes from the passage in 2 Corinthians 8:1-7 dealing with the generous giving of the Macedonian churches. Reading this passage reveals an equation that doesn’t make sense: affliction = abundance + abounding. According to this passage, joy and liberality in giving was produced out of affliction. The Macedonian churches gave beyond their ability to support the ministry of the church planters led by Paul and Titus. This resulted in an abundance for the work and an abounding in knowledge, diligence, and love.

The key appears in verse 5—they first gave themselves to the Lord, and then to the church. Many times when we teach the basics of stewardship we begin with the concept that God owns it all. Well, He does (Psalm 24) but stewardship training may be more effective if we teach to give ourselves to the Lord first. Giving ourselves means surrendering our wills to His will, putting the Lord first in all the things we do. Seeking His will in prayer, through the reading of God’s Word, and through fellowship with other believers contributes to our model for stewardship. The Macedonians gave themselves first to the Lord and look at the abundance that they gave out of their poverty.

I know the thinking—that if God owns it all, we will not argue about what to give. But if I do not first give myself to the Lord, then how will I know that He owns it all and that He wants me to support His work? My encouragement to the next generation of Christ Followers is to first give yourselves to the Lord, then to the work of the ministry of the church, and you will see great things happen in your stewardship and in your walk with the Lord.

Google-ing John 3:16

You all have felt it. It was just a matter of time. Years of surfing the internet has finally caught up with us. Yes, I am talking about the effect of spending massive, cumulative amounts of time online on our brains.

For me, I can think back into the 1990s at some point when the web enticed me into its massive reserve of available information. I had been a library junkie all my life, leafing through pages of information about places and things I enjoy for long periods of time between the stacks. Now thanks to the internet, I could search volumes of information with mere clicks. Pretty soon I got to be very good at this and could ramble through web page after web page without processing anything but key words from the pages. Now, I must confess, these days the web has become the conduit for lots of the information that flows into my mind.

I found a concern over this online information processing in a recent article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, in the current issue of The Atlantic. Carr says that his past decade on the computer rendered him unable to concentrate, that perhaps the neural circuitry of his brain is remapped and his memory reprogrammed. Further, Carr says he used to be able to immerse himself in books and long articles, relishing the narratives of these talented authors; however, today he becomes fidgety and cannot endure any extended amounts of time reading. Huge amounts of research can be done in little time, a boon for writers like Carr, but this form of “power browsing” mimics a form of skimming, i.e., hopping from one source to another source and retaining only small snatches of information.

This may have implications for future generations of Christ followers. Young believers, and some not-so-young believers, today spend huge amounts of time plugged into something, whether it be the internet, cellphones, blue-tooth devices, all making some folks look like human cyborgs. Even text messaging is a hybrid, cyborg-ic form of communication with its short, pithy remarks and lack of care over spelling and form. Our imaginations can run with this stuff and cause us to worry over the technological advances that supposedly have made our lives easier and more advanced. The web has woven something, and I think it is our brains. There may be an appearance of wisdom, but something is lacking.

Is there any wonder that fewer today are reading their Bibles? (Check out the Barna polls). We know that God’s Word is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16), but how can it be if we are unable to meditate on it, dwell in it, and talk about it coherently. Have we been reduced to a mish-mash of gray matter that cannot process even one book of the Bible without losing focus? It is time to counter this trend and return to the tried and true methods of observation, interpretation, and application of God’s Word so that our faith, which is more precious than gold, will be refined and be our one constant in a day of rapid change. God’s Word is a lamp for our feet, and a light for our path—it is not merely a hyperlink to heaven in this cyber age. We may be just one step away from the New Revised Google Version of the Bible.