Conversation Point

In This Moment

Custom Costs More

CBS Sunday Morning recently dedicated a whole program to design. Exploring how we incorporate this powerful, creative tool into our lives was fascinating to consider. Designer food tempted taste buds. Designer puppies melted hearts. Designer household items stirred imaginations. But designer homes, they touched souls.

Our homes may not say everything about us, but they are a starting point for a conversation of our lifetimes. Our homes reflect the design of our lives. Frank Lloyd Wright, famed architect of numerous prairie-style homes, was also well-known for designing these structures down to the lamps on the tables and the silverware in the kitchen drawers. He believed the house should work as a cohesive whole from its beginning. While I respect and admire Mr. Wright's sense of how houses come to be, homes are another matter. Homes take time.

Most of us start our homes in apartments and move on to houses much less grand than the cohesive whole envisioned by a world-renowned architect. Ranches, bungalows, capes and colonials have welcomed many families with open arms. Thought of as starter homes, a place to get a footing by some, others find their niche immediately and stay forever. But as with many other things in life, it's not solely what you have, but also what you choose to do with it. While some people buy up to more elaborate, custom homes, some folks stay put and customize what they already have. Either way, there is a clear investment in creating something special out of a simple, basic beginning. Either way, this journey of transformation teaches us that custom costs more.

Consider that ranch house: three bedrooms, kitchen, dining area, living room and bath, and not quite enough closet space. Left in its original state, that is all it will ever be. But bring a vision to this doorstep, and these rooms expand, stretch and evolve into a personal haven, a neighborhood gathering place, a place of love and creativity. The tangibles may be added over time: a bump out to house the spa-quality steam shower off the master bedroom; an in-ground pool in the backyard; window seats next to the fireplace between the living and dining rooms. Everything takes time because everything also takes money. And unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's notion of completion from the beginning, sometimes living in an incomplete house helps in understanding the true nature of what the home needs to be. Custom costs more money, but it can also take more time.

Which, interestingly enough, is not so different than faith. We don't start out our lives with a complete, detailed understanding of what it means to live a faithful life. Time and experience are our allies in this creative process. We can, of course, choose to maintain a ranch house faith, leaving those five basic rooms plus dining area and bath just as they are when we move in. That means we wouldn't have to ask ourselves any tough questions about why we believe what we believe. We wouldn't have to think about understanding other people's beliefs either because that wouldn't matter to us. Overall it's probably easier and cheaper, and we wouldn't have to disturb our lives past the simplicity of "Jesus Loves Me," the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer. That's plenty of faith for a lifetime, right?

A customized, lived-in faith will cost more. It will take time, attention, study, reflection and a significant amount of personal struggle. Paul wrote of this idea of engaging our faith in his letter to the Philippian church. "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12)." Working out own own salvation is more than an interesting thought. It is a call to embody what we believe in thought, word and deed in conscious, daily living. We all start out with the basics, the Old Testament stories and prophecies, the parables and preaching of Jesus, Paul's letters to the emerging church. But each of us who claims a faith in God also has the glorious opportunity to receive all that God has invested in us from our beginning, discover it and make it our own, and return to our Creator with the gift of a well-lived, faithful life. Customized faith costs more, but the return on the investment is clearly worth the effort.

Until next time, God's blessings.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 2:51 PM 0 comments

In This Moment

Stopping the Impossible

World War II ended more than sixty years ago. Its veterans are now as old as their World War I predecessors I remember from Armistice Day assemblies designed to hold our young minds still on the fact that these conflicts were real. They involved sacrifice, huge loss, and human triumph over a seemingly insurmountable enemy. But it was this second War to End All Wars that held the most horrific of secrets, revealed as Allied troops liberated German concentration camps. The secret was the Holocaust, a measured, intentional plan to destroy the people deemed unworthy for inclusion in Hitler's definition of a perfect world. If the British had not been able to hold off a steady flow of German air raids, if thousands of ordinary people had not hidden their Jewish friends and neighbors, and if the United States had not entered the war, the world would surely be a different place today. The simple fact is that Hitler most likely would have succeeded, and we would not be safe.

We would would know what the people of Darer feel tonight.

Darer is located in the Western section of the African nation Sudan. African Muslims living in this region are facing annihilation by pro-government troops and Arab militias. "Ethnic cleansing," a term with which we have become all too familiar in recent years, is being used again to describe this first genocide of the twenty-first century. People driven from their homes and off their land are now being stalked, then raped and murdered by their tormentors each night as they try to gather wood for campfires to cook food for their children, the ones who escaped with their lives. Their siblings were not all so fortunate. Between 200,000 and 400,000 people are already dead. Those camped on the border of neighboring Chad also face the soon-to-arrive rainy season. Their journey is far from over, and home is only a distant memory.

The rallying cry since those World War Ii death camps were discovered has been two fold: "If we had known we would have done something," and, "Never again."

We now know, and we must act. As ordinary citizens, as people of faith living in a country that claims a moral stand on individual rights, we must do more than was done for the people of Germany, the people of Cambodia, and the people of Rwanda. We must act before this time of mass killing escalates further. We must act before this slaughter becomes a distant, irreparable memory. We must "remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you (Deuteronomy 3:27)." We must remember, and we must take these memories and be empowered by them, outraged by them, and we must act. We must act, out of faith in God, and love for our sisters and brothers who need us.

"Stop Genocide" rallies were held across our nation this past Sunday, April 30, urging the Bush administration to take stronger action to end the violence in Sudan's Darer region. Thousands of people converged on Washington to add their support. The rallies have passed, but the need has not. We can still let President Bush, who clearly stated that another genocide would not occur on his watch, know that we want to help the Sudanese people who are suffering. We can tell our friends, notify our congresswomen and men, our senators and let the White House itself know that what is happening in Africa is wrong, and that it must stop.

We see all too clearly the hatred that has bred this violence, but let us also "see what love the father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are (I John 3:1)." Let us see this love, and act on it.

Until next time, God's blessings.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 8:18 PM 0 comments