It is, once again, time to ponder the eternal mysteries that pour forth from the mind of Franklin Ishida. This month´s theme has already been touched upon somewhat in prior entries, but today´s purpose is to bring in the faith dynamic - where is God in the midst of my estadounidense mind struggles? BTW, has anyone else noticed the "dense" in "estadounidense" before? Canadian friends, feel free to make a joke here.

Saying that reading the Bible is dangerous to insular, oft-imperialistic North American thought is an understatement. If there is any other text out there in the world that comes down so hard on capitalism, multinational corporations, imperialism, self-centered thinking, reckless individualism, and pork rinds as the Bible, I have yet to encounter it. Of course, the grand irony is how often the Bible is used to justify those things.

This, however, is not going to be a claws-out assault on biblical misuse or the imposition of one´s politics upon the Bible, forming it to be what you want it to be. After all, that just perpetuates a cycle of scripture wars and hard feelings, which is as counterproductive a thing as there can be. Rather, this is about my own journey, the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, as I´ve grown and been changed by God in my times in the world.

Probably the hardest thing for anyone from the West/North (take your pick on the nomenclature) to see when they´re out of their comfortable country of origin is poverty. Poverty exists in the West, too, but a few people hustling you for change on the street or sleeping on the heat grates is a different experience from seeing children with stomachs distended from hunger and malnutrition, or entire neighborhoods of tin-and-plywood shacks. It´s unsettling and can shake the faith of even the most devout person, especially once you get to know the children or the people living in the shanty town.

I´ve heard many a televangelist and misinformed Christian attribute prosperity, both personal and national, to God´s special blessing, to the idea that God materially rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked with poverty. That, however, does an incredible disservice to a great many people that I´ve met all over the world. I simply cannot believe that Zurqina, a little girl whose mother has a stall in a food market on the University of Ghana´s campus, is living in desperate poverty because she and her mother are just bad people. Conversely, I don´t see Donald Trump as being a great man of God or a towering example of morality simply because he has more money in the bank than most other humans can ever dream of having.

I´ve found that money means nothing regarding how "good" or "bad" a person is. There are rich people who make their money by hurting other people, and there are rich people who make their money by being fair business people, and who typically give back plenty of what they have. There are poor people who are wonderful people, living lives filled with the fruits of the Spirit, and there are poor people who use their poverty as an excuse for alcoholism and domestic violence. People, at the end of a day, are people - they´re not good, they´re not bad, they´re people. Sometimes, people choose to hurt other people, and sometimes they choose to build others up.

When people choose to hurt others, to oppress them, to take advantage of them for a buck, a cycle of poverty is created - I´m going to take your money and resources, then keep you at a level of development that serves my needs, but doesn´t give you much of a chance to break free. This isn´t biblical; this isn´t in line with a Living Word of jubilee years, 31 chapters of Proverbs exhorting care for widows and orphans and standing up for the rights of the oppressed, prophets who identify abuse of the poor as one of the principle sins of their people, a Messiah who chooses to live without wordly comforts but rather only what He needs to live, and a faith community that shares all its goods in common. I raise my voice about the ways things are and the way things could be not because I´m just another 22 year old stereotypical liberal; I do it because it´s my faith.

I don´t think God has a favorite political party, or that God loves one or two nations while pouring contempt on the rest of them. I don´t think God tosses down heaven-sent moneybags to people for not fornicating. I think God gave us a world filled with the good things that we need to live, and that our mission as followers of God, followers of Christ, is to be serious about, and faithful to, God´s call to stewardship - to find ways to ensure that starvation, lack of access to clean drinking water, lack of access to adequate health care, pollution, and the many other ills that too often characterize human life in the world outside the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe become nonexistent, or at the very least incredibly rare. We have the means, but do we have the boldness to say "no!" to comfortable consumerism, to accept the radical call to take up the cross and follow Jesus in His path of vulnerability and rejection of the easy life?

Maybe that´s not a fair question; some days, I´m the kind of person who´s ready to storm the walls and proclaim a year of jubilee, but other times, it´s not so easy. Maybe it´s a process, a dialectical journey requiring patience, commitment, and above all, faith in a God who has called us to something more than living for ourselves and refusing to think of every other beautiful child of God in the world as just that - our brother or sister, created in the likeness of the same God. Maybe, in the words of John Lennon, I´m just a dreamer, but just maybe, I´m not the only one.