06/02/2011 Human Observations
Luke 21:19
By your patience possess your souls.
By your patience possess your souls.
Working for a living isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Yet, the price of living in this present civilization is expensive. So, many of us go about the daily business of acquiring wages, salaries, or winnings in order to pay for the things that we perceive to make our lives livable. This sounds like a simple enough process, but the challenges can be intimidating. After all, what we are attempting to do each day is to separate someone from their money, taking that money to ourselves. It looks a little sleazy when think of it that way; but that’s the reality of it. Whatever the appearance, civilization makes it a respectable thing, to participate in this process of convincing others to separate themselves from their money. This “permission”, given by cultural agreement, establishes the system of exchange that civilized folks have come to know as “barter”, whereby goods or services are traded. The bible instructs us to trade equal for equal, yet our current civilization has trained us (like circus animals) to accept the incorporation of “profit” into each trade. To a believer in the principle of Capitalism, profits are the gains of business. In my view, profits are the children of greed; and a lot of folks have large families. Where trade results in an imbalanced exchange, greed reigns. Without completely detouring into an ethico-economic monolog, suffice to say that the acceptance of this imbalance at my expense much resembles the above mentioned “patience”, in that while inequity and even oppression rages around me, I have access to a peaceful continuity of understanding, knowing that the Creator of all ability offers us all either eternal life or rope with which to eternally hang ourselves. The choice belongs to us all individually.
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