Readings

Not just about you

Since the start of denominational hunger programs over forty years ago, a truer-than-true maxim has haunted all of us who are trying to feed people, develop their capacities, find cures and change laws. The saying is memorable enough to have stayed around for decades: Live simply so that others simply live.

Here’s how that works out: In a world in which all economies are interrelated, the most widespread, most basic and most difficult cause for hunger is the lifestyle choices of people like you and me. When you multiple by millions of other, like-minded people your individual decisions about what you buy, what you drive, what you eat, what you invest in, what you wear–when that happens, the whole world is affected. 

Why? Because for now the economy of the United States and others like it drive the economies of the rest of the world. Forests are torn down because we want increasing supplies of paper products. People sneak across borders to find “work” because we don’t want to do our own landscaping or clean our own homes. The entire health care system in this country heads toward the toilet, in part because we don’t exercise, don’t eat right and don’t like people who remind us about our stupidities. People in other countries suffer and die when most of the world’s resources are funneled in our direction or fouled by our pollutions.

Get this straight: Living simply goes way beyond the benefits that come to those of us who live simply. Hunger programs and organizations don’t promote simple living so that you can live better. Instead, they propose a greater challenge: Join with others in seeing how we can all change our living habits so that this great and abiding cause for hunger and poverty will be diminished.

God created us as social beings. We have social brains, we live best when we live well with others. We come together in churches to do what we could never do alone. And God meets us there, with an invitation: Live simply, so that others simply live.