Politics is an issue that is still unsettling for me. As someone that is coming into greater discipleship to Jesus Christ everyday I sometimes wonder what my role should be in politics. But for now as my ideas continue to mature and grow I participate experimentally. For now I am very much interested in Ron Paul. He has struck a chord in me that no other candidate has up till this point and it seems I’m not alone. I’ve hesitated to write much about it due to my inadequacies in discussing the issues up until this point.
One of the topics that has interested me as of late is how Christianity works to reclaim its mission of bringing social justice to the earth. Now these two ideas might seem unrelated to you as a reader and honestly they were to me until very recently but I believe they intersect much more than I realized. You see one of the things that Ron Paul has talked a great deal about has been bringing stability to the American economy. Until today I hadn’t quite felt the full impact of that instability. I received a notice that my bank is again cutting my interest rate on my online savings account from 5.05% to 4.25% because of the rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Now don’t misunderstand me I believe that we are still far richer than we certainly deserve and still have a long way to go before we are truly suffering financially. But my point is to show how financial stability brings about social justice. For the longest I have been very uninterested in money and its uses. After reading Richard Foster’s book on simplicity I have a sincere distrust of most of the uses of money. But what I’ve realized is the overwhelming good financial stability can bring to a distressed people. One of the things that first profoundly informed my ideas about this were talks I came across at ted.com. In the video below the speaker shows that while issues of human rights and the sustainability of culture are important that they best preserved through financial growth and prosperity. This video has a lot of meaning especially as efforts of microfinancing as a mission opportunity become more popular.
What all of this ultimately means is that when we foster people’s ability to reach economic sustainability we ultimately lead them out of extreme poverty and lead them into the social justice that carries such great meaning to us. A great primer on this is the book The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. Even in the United States financial stability is of vital importance especially in light of the current housing crisis where some 7 million families are on the verge of becoming homeless due to a failing financial market. I hope to shed some more thoughts on this in the near future but for now I’m excited to continue to explore these ideas and the impact they have on the U.S. and the world. Share your thoughts and check out the videos I think they’ll inspire you.