WE the PEOPLE

Blessedly the transition to socially accepted isolation has been a slow one. One day the house is totally void of Hogans, and way too quiet. The next day they are all here, and then the next there are just a handful of them. As they are working on their new house i have had a lot of time to reflect on our months together. There are a lot of lessons, all of which i am thankful for. Obviously our circumstances here are/were not ideal for the number of folks in a three bedroom house, but there is so much that is/was beautiful about what has been happening here in the last eight or so months.

With the presidential election and the state of affairs of the world i have been thinking a lot about the "split" (i don't like to think of it as a split because we are such good friends and we do love each other terribly! To me a split implies hatred and hard feelings.). As we reenter isolationism as two families it seems horribly unnatural to me and honestly i am having a pretty hard time with both the volume of the house decreasing and the idea that we will be in a place once again where we are having to possess the same things that the guy next door has. In some neighborhoods (and ours is one of those) folks will share some or even many items between neighbors, yet still so many things are duplicated needlessly when we could share together. Our need to possess and to keep up with the Jones', or to one up our neighbors is what is destroying our planet for our children and any chances or teaching our children real peace and love between neighbors.

The elections are now done and over and i have been listening to many of my friends lament how president Obama wants to turn this country into a socialist nation. And they are afraid and resistant, and yet these are the same friends that claim to follow Jesus. i am left wondering, "Wouldn't Jesus want us to be a socialist country?" Not a govermentally forced socialist country but a country of sharing a redistribution caused by an outpouring of love and spontaneity from the heart. Perhaps that is the state of the Church in America. We suffer, but not from persecution, or starvation, but of excess and a inappropriate sense of entitlement.

i didn't vote for Obama. i didn't vote for McCain either. . . i did vote though. While i don't agree wholly with the candidate (sort of) that i voted for, i don't agree with the other two guys either. A government of the people, for the people, and by the people is not a government that leads a people but a people that leads a government. To vote and then consider yourself relieved of all other duties is arrogant. People that think or live this way deserve to live in an oppressively taxed over regulated country.
People instead should steer the government by their actions. When the people start living out the principles taught by Jesus the government will have no option but to follow. To feed the hungry, to love each other, to take care of each other, to tend to the earth, to abolish oppression, to teach each other, to look after our neighbors (all of them local AND global) before ourselves, to speak with one voice, to be the change in the world that we want to see - These are the things that the government is arguing over making us do. . . because WE have FAILED to first do these things ourselves.