Today we enter into the Lenten season.  While I admittedly don’t dive deep into parts of the traditional Christian calendar, I find Lent to be a perfect time to “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  If ever there was a time to consider my own mortality through God’s eyes, its now.

We live in a world where we can simply ask for close to a trillion dollars from the Chinese and they will give it to us, (though they say they “hate us for it, but are forced to comply.”)  We live in a place where at the stroke of a pen, tens of thousands of lives are put to death, others sent to war, still others put to work without pay.  Mega-Corporations are the bullies of the whole earth, on panels with national leaders, deciding our fate on issues they seem interested in so far as it affects their bottom line.  This is the world where we live – where we dominate nature and forget the poor.  Where we play god until we die.  Where greed and security are penultimate values.

This is not the season of Lent.  Lent brings sanity, it brings reflection, finiteness, humility.  This is why I love and need Lent – because in me is the same vices plaguing the entire earth.

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SO!  This year I’m focusing in on how my life affects the whole world.  A “footprint” in the dust I suppose.  Each Wednesday, I look forward to fasting and living into different aspects of my life -

• my marriage
• politics
• finances
• environment
• “the others”:  enemies/immigrants/nations at war
• my witness

Each of these reflections will be done under the lens of what I’m recently calling “my purpose in life”: 

“To live in Heaven, right here on Earth.”

How might experiencing the Kingdom affect my finances?  What might it have to do with the environment?  I look forward to reflecting on these issues on this blog.  I welcome any feedback – and I’d love to know what others are doing for Lent!

BTW – Our house church is using a simple worship guide this Lent – you can find it here.

BTW2.0 – Here’s posts on previous Lents:

Lent 2007 – Oil Fast; Reflections

Living in the city has gotten me “a few steps” closer to living without a car.  Why is this such a big deal?  Several things excite me about this possibility:

1. It sets me free from slavery to the Middle East.  That’s one less American dependant on imported oil, not to mention lays to rest many of the wars and conflict in the region, and keeps money in America, rather than shipping it to Dubai and other oil boom towns in the Middle East.

2. One less exhaust pipe stinking up the city air.  I don’t know about you, but when I ride to work on my bike, it really hits me how much pollution really affects our city environment.  Its sometimes hard to inhale because of all the diesel trucks and cars pumping toxic fumes out on Clark Street.  It sure would be nice if we could smell that sweet Lake Michigan air coming in from just a few blocks away.

3. The most important reason is that living without a car reels us in as humans to a more realistic limit.  Instead of charging ever forward to the next task or errand, maybe living without a car puts a few less things on our plate, and causes us to say “no” to more, and “yes” to only the most important things, which brings me to the point of this post:

Developing healthy disciples of Christ in the urban Chicago scene will be hyper-local (within close reach), will focus on just a few, and will live a counter-cultural lifestyle.  Walking, biking, and taking trains and buses puts you in human-on-human situations in a way that a “cage on wheels” is designed to keep you from.

Think of Jesus and his disciples.  They walked everywhere they went.  Their entire “circle of influence” was within a 3 mile radius.  That’s just a few “tribes” (or neighborhoods) in Israel.  Think of all the holes we would have in the stories of Jesus and his disciples if they drove from city to city (no woman at the well, no healing at the Bethesda pool, no Roman Centurian coming to faith…the list goes on….)  It was because they were more focused on the journey than the destination that gave them a capacity to be sensitive to people in need, and God’s adventure for them along the way.

BTW – I think its awesome how Israel and Chicago are designed into walkable neighborhoods, each with their own distinctive ethnic and cultural flair.  Both even have identical urban design (with lakefront property!)  Check out what I’m talking about:

Fascinating!  A lifestyle of community, neighborhood and walking promotes a discipleship engaged in interaction with neighbors – rather than a curriculum isolated by commute times.

I’m trying to implement this with disciples in our Pray4Chicago Project.  This project is designed to get people out of their cages (cars yes, but also our daily rat-race routines that blind us to what God is doing in the city) and into their neighbors lives.  What sort of things might happen?  Well, when this happened with Jesus and his disciples, he said he saw “Satan fall like lightning from the sky!…and now you can walk among snakes and scorpions and crush them!”  If Jesus gets this psyched about walking, maybe I should park my car, get out of my cage, and give it a try too.

Part of being a disciple of Christ is learning to live in God’s governance; his new economy. In America, we tend to see capitalism as the foundation for our society – production and consumption are the backbone to its market economy. Capitalism tends to put competition at the top of a short list of values for its citizens. We see the vicious, unjust effects of this all the time – the rich are taxed much less than the poor, unemployment, concentration of political and economic exploitation, and environmental rape.

Maybe its time in God’s Kingdom to function more organically in a new economy.

I just found out about time banks! They are really sweet way to use the currency of time to provide services to a local community.

The concept is simple. For every hour you give in service to another Time Bank member, you earn one Time Dollar. You can now use this Time Dollar to spend on a service someone else offers in the time bank community.

Time Dollars are a community currency that members earn by using their time, energy, skills, and talents to help others. Time Banking is about local individuals, organizations or business’s helping each other in one-to-one exchanges or in group projects. Members help rebuild neighborhood networks and strengthen communities. There are lots of time bank communities that set up shop on the internet as a way to search available services and meet their neighbors.

What an amazing way to (1) save money (2) participate in a local, neighbor centered economy and (3) experience the redistribution of wealth and resources. Imagine seeing a white collared businessman doing taxes for a Mexican immigrant family who earned their Time Dollar repainting their black neighbor’s house, who got his Time Dollars by going grocery shopping for the elderly woman across the street. Imagine the crime rate going down as neighbors get to know each other and watch out for each other. Imagine an investment into your own local economy!

“Give and you shall receive” – God’s economy doesn’t include dolla billz, he was talking about relationships!

Maine Time Banks – a time bank up in Portland, Maine

Start Your Own! – no matter how big or how small, why not begin one in your neighborhood?

Living In Story- Reciprocal Missionality in the Image of God – Ron Pate’s participatory seminar that clued me in to time banks. He is a part of SCUPE (Seminary Consortium of Urban Pastoral Education) in Chicago. SCUPE helps communities in Chicago start timebanks (they call it Abundance in the Beloved Community, or ABC’s).