Blindness

You know how people always say that hindsight is 20/20. Of course, we all know that it means that if we could look backwards, we'd never make a mistake. But I'm not entirely sure that's true. There's a very good reason that history repeats itself and I think that it has something to do with the source of blindness, or nearsightedness, that overcomes us all from time to time. When it comes to the human heart, greed makes us all blind.

There is no mistake in the fact that Jesus was born into the poorest of poor families - with just enough to get by in this world. Not only did the young family have to rely upon God to feed them and keep them safe, but there was no real chance for any upward mobility. The irony of the statement, "The poor will always be with us," is that Jesus was poor himself. If you think about it, a great many parables of Jesus speak to money - whether it be talents being put to use or the daily wages of workers or lost coins, Jesus was a poor man who spoke to the poor about a kingdom not of this Earth where wealth and worth were to be measured in our value to others in service to them.

It is hard for us to imagine the Kingdom of Heaven, let alone see it, because of this blindness that engulfs us all. We want our lives and we want our homes and we want our friends and we want our money and then we want even more. And every time we want something we don't have and we don't need, we grow more blind. Like Children running a muck in a candy store, we are gorging ourselves on greed.

Its not just a recent issue. In 2001, when I first started at this company, the decision was made to switch over from a profit sharing plan to a 401K plan. The entire company was brought into the conference room and we sat down across from some bankers. The bankers started throwing out their numbers with smiles and rosy pictures. It was all going to be SO golden. Now, at that point, I had not invested a single dollar into either program, but many of my co-workers had their entire retirement savings in the plan. So I asked, "What happens if this rosy picture you're painting isn't as rosy as you expect?" It was like I had popped the party balloon. Everyone, and I mean everyone, looked at me as if I was insane.

"Well, there are risks, of course," the bankers hedged, "But really, the market always keeps going up. So any money you invest will eventually pay off with huge dividends."

"But what if it doesn't?" I persisted.

"It will," they replied.

Two months later, our 401K plans went into effect, transferring all the money that my co-workers had earned over the previous twenty years with the company into these stock market plans. For my own part, I contributed nearly $100 of my hard earned money to my 401K. The next day, crazed Muslim extremists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in New York and one plane into the Pentagon. Every single person in my company lost 25% of their savings from a plan that would, "eventually pay off with huge dividends." I lost $25. Some of my co-workers lost a thousand times that, or more.

Of course, nobody learns these things. Its like they no longer explain the concept that things too good to be true, usually are. Housing costs continue to go up... so they always will. Stock Markets never go down, so they never will. It can't happen here, until it does. What is the one underlying cause of this blindness?

Greed. Pure and simple. Not the kind of salivating Lothario with the twisty handlebar mustache kind of greed, but the kind that says, "I have a pretty good life, but I still want more." Its a more benign form, but still every bit as dangerous and disastrous.

Those bankers weren't bad people. They weren't trying to mislead the people of my company. They, like my co-workers, were convinced that what they were saying was true. But they were basing their convictions on false evidence and on their own assumptions about the world and about the unchanging nature of things. They assumed that since everything was doing fine today, it would continue to do so into the future. Their faith in the financial institutions was based upon a very limited knowledge of the future. My response to them was borne out of a faith of a different nature - a faith in God who tells me that, "Even these walls shall one day crumble." The only thing that is constant in life is God and His love for me - all other things are sketchy at best. Their view of the world was skewed by the idea that because they had gained so much wealth before, the world would continue to provide it to them and to all who did as they did.

So at the core of the world's problems right now is a fundamental blindness caused by Greed. Those who had, wanted more. Those who didn't have, wanted in. It was the world's largest and most elaborate Ponzi scheme ever devised - most bubbles are. And, as usual, the repercussions will be felt by everyone - guilty and innocent alike.

I read the other day of a "poor" couple who were about to become homeless with their three kids. It seems that this Northern California couple invested the equity in their long held family home and bought another home with it, which they rented out to tenants - whose rent was used to pay off the mortgage. This worked so successfully that they used the equity on the second home to buy a third, and then a fourth, and then a fifth. And it all worked so wonderfully. For a few years, they were very well off and enjoying life. And then the market collapsed and the values of these new homes plunged. And suddenly this family couldn't afford the mortgages on the new homes, nor on their own home. In the end, I can only assume that they lost everything.

Its easy to look back and ask, "What we're they thinking?" But I'm telling you my friends, if you want to keep from stumbling in the darkness of blindness, you need to keep your eyes open now, not in hindsight. What they were thinking is that they didn't have enough already and that with a few quick and easy "turns" of these new homes, they could become even more wealthy than they already were. And as a result, they lost everything. They gambled their own home on four others, and temporarily won, but ultimately lost. How much more the Kingdom of Heaven?

This is the attitude that has brought us to this point. It is nothing new. It did us in in 1988. It did us in in 1929. It did us in in 1898. It did us in in the 1870's. It has done us in in every nation and every land we've come from. It did in the Kingdom of Israel. It did in the Kingdom of Judah. It did in Egypt. It is a human condition that goes back to the fall of Man.

The only hope is to humble our ambitions and walk closely with God. All other paths will leave us stumbling in the dark in a state of blindness of our own choosing. We can have perfect clarity in God and avoid the pitfalls and snares of this world, but to do so, we first have to renounce the importance of things and embrace the omnipotence of God.