You’ve all heard it. “You will own nothing and be happy.” Individuals separated from their families, herded into cities. Working at jobs that cover less and less of the cost of living, that are less and less fulfilling. Yet we stick with this way of doing things that is obviously breaking under the strain.

Why?

Because we’ve been told, “You, and your spouse if you’re lucky (or unlucky), have to make it on your own.”

Our society is full of people who are the opposite of the Apostle Paul’s description of himself and his fellow apostles. People who, “…are treated as true, and yet are impostors; as famous, and yet unknown; as living, and yet are dying; as unpunished, yet marked for death; as happy, yet filled with grief; as rich, but by making many poor; as having everything, yet possessing nothing.”

All this because we have forgotten how to love and support each other. Families dissolve, over causes both weighty and trivial. Corporations are told to support their workers, yet shrink from the burden. Scams multiply and become ever more powerful and subtle. Governments, famed as the support of last result, plead poverty and an inability to cope. We’re fools, marks, victims. We long, like the seven women of Isaiah, for someone to claim us as theirs, so as to take away our disgrace.

These are the marks of a slave, of a dependent.

There is an alternative. Not to stop being a slave: for we are either slaves to sin, or slaves to righteousness. Yet the slave to righteousness is a free man; and he who is free in Christ is a slave. But if we’re slaves in this sense, we can know love and joy.

The second thing is to stick together. Don’t say to your fathers and mothers, your sons and daughters, your sons in law and daughters in law, that they have to do it on their own.

Perhaps, if you’re reading this, you’re a Boomer or a Gen Jones. Perhaps in your day, doors just opened. If you were in one of the great settler colonies, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you lived in one of the few parts of the world that, having been settled mostly by (at least nominally) Christian Europeans, was not devastated by war. You and your people could sell and not buy; could lend and not borrow. You were materially blessed.

Those days are gone. The rest of the world is fast catching up with us; has in many cases caught up with us. The standard of living that an ordinary person can expect is no longer the envy of the rest of the world, at least not to the same degree.

This is why we have to hang together. Live close to your family, so that you can support them and they you. Your costs will stay down. More of what you earn, you’ll be able to keep. Invest your profits in the people you love, not in stuff. Don’t worry about building bigger barns. It was a fool who said that he could take life easy for many years.

Be an owner. More than that, be a steward of the things, and the people, that the Most High God has entrusted to you. Be God’s slave. Be a free man (or woman) in society. Be responsible. Be joyful.

And may God bless the work of your hands every day.

~ The Mad Scientist

PS. The other day I walked into our garage on some mundane errand and heard a small animal cry. It turned out to be a kitten, separated from his mother, who had somehow found his way into the garage and got stuck there. We offered him to a neighbour who had nursing mother cats, but the nursing mothers wouldn’t take the little kitten. So we found ourselves with yet another cat.