Gravity is absorption, expansion, swelling, acquisition; it is emptiness seeking to be filled. This is the natural course of things, in the spiritual world as in the physical. In our human nature, we seek to pull toward ourselves all that we can—possessions, food, praise or recognition, other people. And we are in competition to gather the most mass, always gauging our progress by the size of those around us.

Some will collect as much of one type of thing as they can, such as wealth or experiences, while others will try for a little of everything in the name of being well-rounded. And there are a number of curious cases, as one with an eating disorder may push away food, but only to make room for the love that she believes she will get from being thin. All gravity.

But grace is the exception to all of this. It is an unnatural force: one from fairy tales, which would have us clinging to the grass as a ceiling or to a tree as a chandelier, in order to keep from tumbling upward, and from being pulled away from this world and its unfulfilling way of living.

Gravity is “I”, or self. Grace is “you”. It’s the force that causes me to push away from myself for the good of others. To shrink in size against the inclination to accumulate; to decrease, in order that He may increase. To humble myself, to quietly withdraw my name as a contender in the game played by the world, which is won or lost depending on so many worthless accomplishments.

The core of the earth is molten. Every action of mine which resists gravity contributes to this: ascending stairs or jumping, of course—but even standing, sitting, or really, doing anything else but falling. The energy from the resistance is transferred to the center of the earth, where it becomes heat, and the earth rages inwardly for my defiance of it.

So it is with spiritual gravity. Grace is a willful vacuum, and nature abhors it for that reason. It’s easier to give in and play the game, but we’ll set our minds on things above, where our sights will be higher and our goals loftier. May the earth burn up for our resistance to its gravity, and may we build our foundations solidly so that they will survive when that day comes.

Throughout the evening, I just did what I normally do when in public—size up strangers in my mind as they pass by, writing abridged life stories to explain their every action that I disapprove of. The moment I walk out the front door, this little internal criticizer flickers to life and begins to simmer just beneath the surface, hidden from the sight of my always-vigilant sentry of a conscience. But as I waded through the sea of thousands of people that night, my criticizer must have gotten a bit careless due to the amount of work it had to do, because it broke the surface just long enough for my conscience to spot it and sound the alarm.

And the clarity came to me all at once as I realized this is a terrible habit to have. To reduce a human being from three beautiful and vivid dimensions down to one, dull and faded; to rewrite his biography to read like a coloring book instead of a complex character study that would make Dostoevsky look like Dr. Seuss—a terrible and poisonous habit.

Jesus told a story in Luke 11 about a demon who leaves a man, but decides to return after realizing it has nowhere else to go. Upon arriving, it finds the house clean and orderly—but vacant. So it brings seven other demons with it, and as Jesus says, “the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

I didn’t understand the relevance of this parable until a few weeks ago. Now, I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the subject matter, which is literal demonic possession. But this is a divine perception into the root problem behind habitual sin: the house may be in order, but it’s still empty! No matter how hard we try, we can never just stop doing or quit thinking something, and this is why so many of us give up after repeatedly failing.

No, the only way to overcome these habits is to deliberately push them out of our minds with something else to fill the void—something as good as the habit was bad. An eviction is nothing more than an idle threat if the landlord doesn’t change the locks and rent out to someone else.

And for me, with my demon of criticism, this means chasing away “Well, the choice of food in his shopping cart explains the need for a motorized scooter” with a picture of that person standing right next to me in eternity, in his glorified and perfect body, singing praises to our Creator with notes and scales that don’t exist in this world. It’s very difficult to have wrong thoughts about another person when you understand what they’re made for.

About a month earlier, our group had spent a few hours volunteering at Freedom for Youth Ministries, an organization dedicated to reaching the homeless teenagers and young adults in the city with the gospel.* One of their many ways of making a difference is the Safe Haven, a transitional house for boys ages 18 to 21. At the Safe Haven, they get the opportunity to live in a highly structured community environment while learning trade skills (such as welding and woodworking) and life skills (such as planning a budget). We didn’t know if they had any budding entrepreneurs we could finance, but it was at least worth asking.

Later that week I mentioned all this to my friend Jeremy over lunch. He thought it was a fantastic idea. But his opinion meant a lot more than just sideline support: What I didn’t know is that for the past year, Jeremy had been in talks with Mark Nelson (the founder and executive director at FFYM) about starting a new side of the ministry called Freedom for Youth Enterprises.

The idea behind FFYE is that it’s a for-profit corporation, and it employs the residents of the Safe Haven and the Promise House (the female counterpart transitional house) in various business ventures, with the intention being to teach good work ethics while generating money to finance the main ministry. After coming up with the idea, Mark immediately set his sights on Jeremy to run it. (If you knew Jeremy you’d know why. There’s not a more perfect job in the world for him.)

Jeremy called a few days after our lunch and said he’d told to Mark about our microfinance idea and that Mark wanted to set up a meeting with us to develop it. He even had someone in mind for our first project: a kid with a great deal of artistic talent who wanted to start a T-shirt business.

We’re still working on the details of the program, but it’s by no means just a low-interest loan. One of the conditions of the loan is that we meet with him weekly to hear updates until the loan is repaid. Through this, we hope to develop a mentoring relationship with the entrepreneur, helping him to develop his business and providing guidance along the way. And when the loan is repaid, we can lend it to someone else or even reinvest it back into the business.

Now, a couple months later, Jeremy is on the payroll at Freedom for Youth Enterprises and we hope to start our microfinance experiment sometime in the fall. I still can’t believe how well everything fit together, but I thank God for the opportunity we’ll have to try this out. If this first venture is in any way successful, we hope to develop the program into something more scalable so that we can involve other churches in Des Moines.

It may be huge or it may never really get off the ground. I don’t know. But our success or failure won’t be measured in the amount of profit we generate for Freedom for Youth or by how many jobs we create; the program’s success will be measured by how well we are able to develop lasting and meaningful relationships with these kids. That’s something we just can’t do with Kiva.

The book had a lot of convicting things to say about how Western Christians practice their faith in view of the rest of the world. We came away from the book with the feeling that we as a group needed to do something beyond just sitting at a table talking about the world’s problems.

One topic discussed pretty extensively in the book is called microfinance. I had never heard of it before reading the book, but the basic concept is this: By donating money, we may be able to feed a hungry person in a third-world country, but we will do very little to pull him out of poverty—which is the root problem of hunger. And sometimes our donations can actually work against us, perpetuating his poverty by making him dependent on the donations like a deer at a park who no longer knows how to feed itself.

Microfinance, on the other hand, involves giving small low-interest loans (usually less than $1000) to help someone start a business. This money is then repaid over the course of six months to a year, at which point it can be reinvested toward another entrepreneur. So now the money has been used to provide a source of income for someone, and even a source of jobs for the community if the business does well enough, as many have. And after the loan is repaid, we can use the same money over and over again to give that opportunity to others.

Of all the concepts in the book, microfinance is the one that resonated with us the most. We got a group account at Kiva, a very well-run microfinance organization, then pooled our money and started lending. We made our first loan to a grocery store in Uganda that requested some capital to purchase more produce and mineral water. So far they’ve paid back 75% of the loan amount and are right on schedule to pay back the rest.

But we still felt like we needed to do more. Just as it is a danger to focus only on your immediate surroundings and ignore global issues, it’s also a danger to focus on the rest of the world to the exclusion of your neighbor. How can we help Des Moines?

I concluded by pushing for a return to a more communal mindset, describing a vision of a neighborhood where neighbors actually talk to each other and aren’t afraid to ask for help when it’s needed—and a call for Christians to be the initiators in this, to be the ones to ask to borrow tools instead of making a trip to Lowe’s every time they need something they don’t have, and to freely offer of their resources to others.

Great, right? At least that’s how I envisioned it in my head. But I never posted it. The words didn’t fit together, the tone was all off, and I just wasn’t able to say what I wanted to say. I regularly spend three or four hours a week writing and fine-tuning the things I post here, but after about five hours with that one I still had nothing. So “Interdependence Day” just sat in a notebook for awhile as July 4, 2009 came and went, and with it my opportunity for a timely play on words.

About a month ago we had new neighbors move in next door: a mom and dad in their 30s, their two kids ages five and six, and the kids’ grandparents, every one of them very outgoing and friendly. Especially the kids, and especially the six-year-old.

Every time he sees me outside, he asks if he can come over and help me with whatever I’m doing. (Can I bring my skateboard over, too?)

If I’m not outside, he’ll knock on my door to ask me for help with something trivial, like cutting up and peeling an apple. (I can’t eat the peel because I have a loose tooth and it might fall out.)

He saw that I was grilling shish kebabs the other day and he asked me for the recipe. (Oh, and can we borrow those metal sticks too? I don’t think we have any of those.)

In short, he’s making me be my ideal interdependent neighbor. He’s forcing my generosity, and the worst part is that my first reaction is often reluctance rather than the limitless charity I want to be known for. I’m sure his parents have skewers for grilling, but why did I tell him that instead of just saying they could borrow them any time they wanted?

So I’m learning. In retrospect, I think that’s why I wasn’t able to get the words out last year: I didn’t have any experience to back up my grand calls for reform. Maybe next year I’ll have something to say. In the mean time, the kid already invited us over to dinner. I need to step up my game.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

There are many who are so obviously my neighbor—the misfortunate, the poor, the sick—that I am quick to love them, or at least to want to love them, meanwhile forgetting that this command has another imperative, which is to love each of them as myself. This is one of those occasions where I assume I understand something Jesus said and then don’t give it a second thought.

But it doesn’t mean “treat others the way you would want to be treated.” That’s much too simple when dealing in the subject of love, and Jesus already said it someplace else.

No, it means “treat others the way you treat yourself”. The difference is great. I would be grateful if someone gave me something to eat when I was hungry, so out of empathy I will give food to a food drive. But I will give of my excess, and I don’t have excess of my favorite foods. I will only ever have just enough or not enough of the things I like; I only have too much of what I don’t like.

But is it really loving in the same way as I love myself if I donate my canned beets and sauerkraut, which I hate? Or even that salsa that I bought two jars of because it was on sale, but didn’t end up liking very much? (Is it loving in the same way as I love myself if I carry McDonald’s gift certificates to give to homeless people if they ask for money, even though I myself wouldn’t eat at a McDonald’s?)

I had the opportunity to experience the other side of this the day I volunteered at Hope Ministries last year. They told us in advance that they wanted our group to bring ten cans of soup and ten bottles of water to hand out to the people in the homeless camps by the river—but then at lunchtime they surprised us by making us eat what we had brought instead of the food from the soup kitchen like we planned. I was very surprised as some of the people refused outright, choosing to go hungry rather than eat the food they had brought to donate because it wasn’t good enough.

But isn’t it better to give something than to give nothing? No. The food pantries of the world already have enough canned corn and Hormel chili. What’s important is that my heart is in the right place for service, and if I can’t give my best to the least—if I can’t love them in the same way as I love myself—then I shouldn’t give at all.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan to the Jewish scholar to show that your neighbor meant anyone he was able to show love to. But just like the closed-minded Jew, I lack imagination in understanding who could be my neighbor.

To most Americans of our day, Jesus might have told a parable about the Good Iraqi, who helped a wounded soldier at cost to himself even though his brother had just the week before been killed by stray shrapnel from a round of American freedom-bombing. Just the sort of story that could get Jesus assassinated.

If He was telling the story to me, though—to someone who thought he had a pretty good grasp of what everyone means—it might go something like this:

Two young adults graduated from college and landed good entry-level jobs in their field of study. Finding themselves with more discretionary income than they knew how to spend, and resolving to plant their feet solidly in the middle class, they each bought a house. Now both of them were handy and decided to fix up the houses on their own.

The first went to remodel his bathroom and found that the previous owners had done a very poor job of painting in corners that were out of plain view. Cheap new tile had also been laid to cover up a mildew problem. In the coming weeks he found many other cases like this where the owners had covered up something in haste to make the house appear better than it was.

The second, meanwhile, finishing the basement, found that his house’s electrical wiring had been updated recently, and in doing so, the last owners had made it very easy for him to wire the basement into the main electrical system. In fact, behind every wall he tore down and inside every light fixture he removed, in every part of the house that had been updated, he found that they had taken great care to do everything even above and beyond the minimum requirements of the residential building code.

Now, I ask you: Which of the previous homeowners was a neighbor to the new homeowner?

“What’s mine is mine” – for now, yes, but it won’t always be that way. This is reason enough to respect all kinds of property.

Who then is my neighbor? Anyone who can be affected by my actions, even if I will never meet him or even know his name.

So this past weekend at the Plaza in Kansas City, I was sitting on a bench with my friend Kyle when two people in their early twenties came up to us carrying a stack of literature. It amused me afterward that my first thought was to wonder what movie they were promoting. It turns out they were just evangelizing.

If you could call it that. Reading from a Chick tract, they explained to us the emptiness of worldly pursuits such as backbiting and whoremongering. After that, one of them asked if we drank alcohol. We answered factually that we did. He then asked if he could pray for us about that. Kyle said No. I don’t want you to pray for me because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m Kyle. What’s your name?

And so we talked. We talked for about ten minutes. Jake told us he was a brand-new intern at a local missions organization who had left everything behind in Indiana when he recognized that the environment in his hometown was restricting his growth as a Christian. He also learned that Kyle and I were Christians and not in any way alcoholics. He ended up praying that God would give us signs and visions and went on his way.

The word evangelize comes from the Greek word euangelizo, which means “to bring good news”, and Jesus’ good news was always “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near” (see Mark 1:14-15). It had little to do with saving us for the sake of freedom from sin, and much to do with preparing our hearts for the inevitable arrival of Jesus’ future kingdom.

But here I am using rhetoric to excuse my inaction, as I often do. I can pick apart their methodology all I want, but they were spending their Friday evening in faithfulness to God. I, on the other hand, didn’t proclaim the good news to anyone.

If I doubted my faith, it wouldn’t be due to scientific evidence or philosophical reasoning. The most compelling arguments against my faith are the practical ones, the arguments based on things that can be observed rather than those that can be reasoned.

Christianity is a last resort for desperate people. Most high-profile conversions, like Brian Welch from Korn a few years ago, are due to a person reaching the end of his rope. Alcoholics Anonymous uses a belief in God as a starting point for overcoming an addiction. And many who are terminally ill will turn to religion for the few months they have left. People use the idea of God as a psychological crutch because they are weak and they need something to help them cope with the darker side of life.

Christianity is not rational. It is an unnecessary cure for a fabricated disease. Sin can easily be explained in purely natural terms as our survival instinct. Animals are greedy, promiscuous and even murderous, and we don’t call it sin. We don’t really need to be “saved” from anything – we just need to abandon the concept of sin and quit feeling bad about what we do.

The Bible isn’t very distinctive from a literary standpoint. In the Old Testament, the poetry is often dull, the prophecies incoherent, and the narrative awkward. Parts of it are wonderful, but maybe 75% of it is skippable. If God wrote a book, couldn’t he have done a better job?

The Christian view of the world is too narrow. Christians set up camp on a hill overlooking a valley; the intellectual elite—scholars, leaders and artists—are always climbing higher up the mountain, and from that vantage point they can see that there is much more to the world than that valley. To them, the Christian worldview is something to be passed through, not stopped at. In other words: those who are inside the box of religion are afraid to go outside, but those who make it outside never want to go back in.

How do I answer these objections? The poem in Philippians 2 is the key to everything:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
    taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

If our faith isn’t always rational, consider that it wasn’t rational for the Creator of the universe to die for his creations.

If our faith is especially attractive to the lowly and weak, consider that when the God of the universe became a baby, he could not even hold his head up on his own.

If the Bible is not distinctive, consider that Jesus was born to poor parents in a filthy stable in an unimportant town in an oppressed nation.

If our faith is not taken seriously by the rich, the powerful, and the intellectuals, consider that Jesus’ birth was announced only to a group of shepherds.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
    ”I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
    AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.”

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The word kenosis comes from the Greek word for “emptiness”, and it refers to the idea that Jesus emptied himself of his divine glory and dignity in order to be incarnated as a human. He gave it all up so that he could become what he wanted to save. Even apart from his words and actions, the very nature of Jesus Christ’s incarnation shows us how we should conduct ourselves as Christians.

We follow a foolish faith. We are fools for believing it. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise! His wisdom is above all others, but it is not merely an enhanced version of our own; it is altogether different.

And God, in his wisdom, engineered a world in which faith and trust are valued above all else. He will never allow his existence to be proven; he’s given enough evidence to satisfy those who already believe, but not enough to convince those that do not, so that it is impossible to reach him without faith.

If you require proof in order to believe, you will never find it, but if you believe first, you will find that you have all the proof you need. And this is foolishness.

Despite its age, it holds a battery charge for a week, and gets reception in places you wouldn’t believe. It has been dropped a few times, but you couldn’t tell from looking at it. It has never caused her a problem.

Meanwhile, Joel is on his third RAZR in six months. Look at how far cellular technology has progressed in the last few years: We now have hand-held phones that play music, take pictures, and fall apart if you shake them too hard.

How quickly we abandon quality for convenience. It’s not hard to see in our culture. Even though the food at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is a nutritional nightmare, it’s fast and cheap; low-quality and overpriced digital downloads have replaced the crystal clarity of CD audio; wireless technology is dominant, even though it is unreliable and slow compared to wired alternatives.

It has permeated every aspect of our culture – technology, environmentalism, art, relationships, and perhaps more inconspicuously, religion.

Because when it comes down to it, Jesus is inconvenient. He is impractical. He always seems to get in the way of my affairs, reminding me that the harder road is usually the right one, or telling me that I am not worthy of Him if I love anything else more than Him.

Jesus is inconvenient, and so those who do not have Him do not want Him, and those of us who do have Him are usually guilty (to varying extents) of trading the real Jesus for an innocuous, manufactured version of Himself. We do this by taking certain of His sayings seriously while ignoring others that do not fit into our already-established lifestyle. Make him white; make him handsome; make him political; make him tolerant. This plastic jesus is convenient because he agrees with us, but he is fragile and easily broken.

But the thing about Jesus – the inconvenient, real Jesus – is that He is forgiving. No matter how many times I exchange the truth of God for the lie that I can find happiness in anything but Christ, I am still His missing son. He lovingly awaits my return, and when I do find my way back into His arms, He throws a celebration party.

This is the Jesus I will always come back to.