My Superpower

I'm the strongest person in the world.


I've now been through 4 classes of Sociology, and in case you didn't read my last post, it's my favorite class!  But it's also very very challenging, and I find myself asking some daunting and very very hard questions during class.  I wanted to share some of them with you:

1. Newspapers over the last decade have dropped from a 10th grade reading level to a 3rd grade reading level.  Why is our society continually lowering the bar to the lowest common denominator, rather than raising the bar and asking people to meet a standard?  How do we fix this problem?  No Child Left Behind is a perfect example of a government-sponsored act involving this phenomenon... How do we reverse this thinking?  
2. Economically, Capitalism MUST grow or it dies.  Stability is not an option in Capitalism, only growth.  But... is there a limit?  What happens when we reach that limit?  How can we preemptively stop this from happening?
3. Because America is, in fact, one of the few (partly because of it's unique emancipation) former colonies that has achieved a developed state and economic power by following a western modernization model, how does this affect our worldviews, and more specifically our charity views?  
4. How should/can we interact in a completely globalized system WITHOUT increasing the gap between rich and poor?  Is there a good model from history, or do we need to develop a new world model?  How does corruption affect/play into the global economic system?
5. What's the best model for charity?  How does one suggest you should go about helping other undeveloped countries without damaging their political, social, and economic structures?  Has this ever been successfully and practically implemented?

These are just a few of the biggest and most daunting questions I've come across in just 4 days of class.  And although this is exactly the sort of thing I want to spend my life dealing with, from a classroom standpoint, it seems absolutely daunting.  And completely impossible.  I love this class - it's provocative, it's perfect for me, it's about questions and thinking and people and government and harmony.... And yet every time I go into that class thinking, hoping, questioning; during the class, it's a roller coaster that takes me from anger to apathy to compassion to humility to shame to pride to frustration to apathy again and ultimately to sheer confusion;  by the time I come out of the class, I have no idea what it is that I'm feeling other than extreme and consuming hurt.  And it makes me ask if it's worth it.  To let it hurt, to make me cry and want to hit people and scream and go live in a hole where I can just pretend that none of this exists...  Is it worth it?  

And then I remember the collage I'm working on, with one of my favorite quotes of all time.  It goes like this: 

"What is, therefore our task today? Shall I answer: "Faith, hope, and love"? That sounds beautiful. But I would say--courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature...we lack a holy rage--the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth...a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God's earth, and the destruction of God's world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that restlessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian Church have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish...but never the chameleon." 

And then I remember the famous verse -- With God, ALL things are possible.  ALL things.  Not just the things that I see are possible, but literally anything.  I could be invisible if God chose to make me.  I could have any super power in the world.  But my prayer today is that God can give me the power of super-human strength.  My weakness becomes His strength, and in Him, my strength.  I pray that God will give me the strength to let it hurt more than anything in this world, that God will continually be my guide, my companion, my rock and my salvation, that God will fill me with His spirit, and that I can do whatever it is that God calls me to do with His strength.  I will not change the world.  I will not be famous, I will not win a Nobel Prize, or be on Oprah, or become a famous author, I will not become some icon of peace or world harmony.  But I will change lives.  And I will love people with all of my heart, and when I run out of my heart and my imperfect, limited love I will give them God's perfect and limitless love.  I will be the strongest person in the world.