Consider-It

The pace at which we now live, and consider normal, precludes responsibility. Since not enough time is given to question one's response, our knee-jerk reactions are too often irresponsible. In order to be responsible one must first be considerate. In order to be considerate over what one is saying or doing, one must first have time to consider it.

Like machines in a factory, in the name of timesaving efficiency, we've been trained to act without thinking. We're expected to respond to directive stimulus without considering any personal responsibility for what we've done. Someone else is making the moral and ethical decisions for us because, were we to take the time and make the effort to make these decisions for ourselves it would only slow us down and decelerate the industrial machine. In our effort to live lives of personal integrity we would be compromising the corporate integrity and profits of the plan mapped out for us.

Robbed of the time needed to be considerate and responsible, naturally enough, we feel rushed and driven, as if there were no time left for us to live or enjoy life. Repeating the mantra, "for the sake of family", we continue to yield to the pressures that destroy family cohesion. "For the sake of community", we yield to pressures that destroy neighborhoods. "For the good of the nation", we abdicate our regional responsibilities. Finally, allowing this mantra to dominate our thinking, eventually overshadowing personal integrity, "for the good of all mankind" we destroy the world.

When what we needed most is to mind our own business and seek to live quiet lives in all purity and godliness with reverence for God and love for one's family, friends, and neighbors, the industrial complex has displaced and usurped our natural loyalty. We tout our integrity to the corporation, to the state, to the nation, to the environment, and to the world and yet we lack the integrity we need to live responsibly in the personal sphere of our daily lives and relationships.

We yield to government and corporate expectations and are duly rewarded with a new placard on our door, a diploma to hang on our wall, a higher credit allowance and, unfortunately, the increase in our workload the system and its managers feel justify the benefits we've received. We are successful -- most of us -- in the eyes of everyone excepting our family, our friends, our neighbors and our God.

To restore a measure of sanity to our lives we must do the one thing the world considers inconsiderate, irresponsible, and bordering on insane -- we must stop punching the debt clock and begin to live within our means. Any debt we accrue should belong to us alone and not to the children of future generations. The tools and skills we lack we must develop for ourselves, humbly learning from others and bartering for what we cannot buy or learning to live without.

Our morality must not sink to the level of needing to be legislated but must rise to the level of loving our neighbor as our self. In other words, we must learn to be considerate. But consideration takes time and until we step off the whirring merry-go-round of profit and prestige, we will never have enough time to be truly considerate. To be considerate, we must take time to consider it.

Michael Leonard Hennen

Agricultural Tyranny

Tyranny requires people to sustain the system that exploits them. The 'system' may be the brainchild of a person, a government (military or political), or an infrastructure. But regardless of the source of the tyranny it can only be managed through intimidation and deceit. Where people are afraid they invariably yield to exploitation. Where people are deceived they tolerate tyranny (whatever its ilk) for as long as they remain deceived about the alleged benefits of the tyrannical system.

Whether intentional or not, the tyranny against local agricultural autonomy has two forms -- urbanization and industrialization. Where house is joined to house, so that the land can no longer sustain its inhabitants, agriculture becomes the slave of luxury. Everyone needs to eat but not everyone wants to work to grow the food they need to survive. That 'odious' task is relegated to those seen as 'less sophisticated laborers' -- in other words, to family farmers. By default, urbanization tyrannizes local agriculture.

To avoid the distasteful stigma of human agricultural exploitation (and to turn a healthy tax-profit in the process), governments usually promote agricultural industrialization. In this way, rather than exploiting their fellow man, they are able to exploit the efficiency of machines and the fertility of the land. However, the long-term productivity of the land is better served when tended personally by the smallholder rather than by industry. Of course, it may be legitimately argued, this effort neither makes one extravagantly wealthy nor is it industrially efficient. But is that really important in the epic scheme of things?

It is true that more men will have to sacrifice more time and personal effort to make the smallholder's land 'fruitful' than under the management of a centralized industrial regime. Yet, at the very least, these personal efforts at local cultivation will feed one's family if not the nation, resulting in one less family on the government dole. Farming will also keep one's children out of trouble while engaging them in meaningful labor that promotes a healthy work ethic, good nutrition, and strong bodies (assets to any nation).

Where there are many houses, there is no land left to tend and land that is no longer tended cannot sustain the luxury of the people living on it. For, ultimately, the rich are sustained by the fruitfulness of the land and even the wealthy perish where the land is made barren. But the industrial solution, since it wears out the land through its relentless exploitation, offers little long-term hope for resolving this dilemma. For where the land is cultivated more by industry than by families it quickly loses its long-term fertility.

What is the lesson to be learned here? Agriculture cannot sustain industry. It was never meant to. It cannot sustain that which exploits it to death and all industry (in some measure) exploits agriculture as reliably as the wealthy exploit the poor. Poverty is always the wholesale price of extravagance and greed. Luxury both causes and becomes the eventual victim of its own exploitation.

Thus, the tyranny of luxury that further impoverishes the poor also eventually erodes the foundations of a nation's health and wealth. This is the fruit of agricultural tyranny -- that a people who can no longer provide for themselves bankrupt the nanny state they've created to serve them. Under such duress, the government's options are few -- revolution, repentance, or war. In the current social venue, where an expedient solution will only compound the problem, the right choice rests on the courage and humility of a nation's leaders.

Michael Hennen

Natural Blessing

Nature is inherently fruitful. Barrenness is unnatural. Sterility and barrenness are perversions of nature. That is not to say that all barrenness is the result of perversion. Rather, perversions of nature are inherently sterile. Wherever barrenness and sterility prevail, a violation of nature has probably taken place. One organism can impose that violation of nature upon another, or the violation of nature can be a mutual choice. But wherever this trespass has occurred, nature wars against its perpetuation.

There are distinctions of kind in nature that prevent unwholesome and unhealthy imbalances. These distinctions prevent one kind of animal from regenerating offspring with another. They also prevent animals of the same gender from regenerating. Thus, mules cannot reproduce with one another any more than females can reproduce without males or males without females. Such relationships represent a perversion of nature.

Nature tends toward harmony and balance. Anything that threatens to compromise this harmony and balance is unnatural. Whatever is unnatural depends on what is natural to sate its appetite. But, though the unnatural can sustain itself with the nature that surrounds it, it does not and cannot contribute to the collective resource value of nature through regeneration. Rather, it siphons off nature's resources to satisfy its own short-lived narcissistic imbalance. The unnatural can destroy the local balance of nature, but it cannot regenerate that ability in others. Praise God! At some point, when it has consumed all available resources, without the ability to reproduce, the unnatural will invariably perish.

But, lest you think that such unnatural perversions and the resulting sterility are limited to the animal kingdom, consider the genetic barriers that prevent plants of one kind from crossbreeding with another kind. Apples and oranges, except when engineered by the most rigorous imposition of perverse and unnatural processes, cannot regenerate 'appanges' or 'orpples'. And when such perversions of nature are forced upon it, we often find that fauna dependent on flora for its daily sustenance, when given the choice, will prefer the unadulterated varieties to these engineering marvels. Thus, beef cattle prefer natural corn to genetically engineered varieties.

Wherever the preference for unnatural food does prevail, it is usually because flavor enhancers have been engineered into the product, not because the engineered variety is necessarily better for us. We can fool our preferences into consuming poison but not without devastating effects. Eventually, because nature strives toward balance and harmony, the detrimental effects of the perversion of nature will manifest in barrenness and death.

By contrast, nature is inherently reproductive. It regenerates itself by the most efficient means possible. It seeks out the environment that provides it with the best venue for regenerating resourcefulness. Thus, certain seeds prefer and flourish in certain climates and soils and certain animals prefer and flourish in certain climates at certain seasons. By the same virtue, certain animals gather in herds, others in prides, packs, swarms, schools, or flocks, and humans gather in families and neighborhoods.

It is only natural that organisms of one kind should gather to perpetuate their natural preference. It is also only natural that barrenness and death should limit unhealthy, unnatural preferences. When the viability of an organism is threatened, nature intervenes to nullify that threat. That such conflicts occur within nature should not surprise us. Far more remarkable is the genius that gave nature that ability.

There is a natural blessing cast upon all of creation. It is a blessing from God that perpetuates the balance and harmony of His design. Wherever the violation of that balance and harmony is threatened, barrenness and death inevitably seek to sterilize such unnatural preferences. All of nature conspires to oppose what is unnatural.

Thus, seed that is unsuitable to a certain soil or environment will either cross with more suitable seed of its kind or eventually deplete what it needs to regenerate and survive. Where, certain animals have become overpopulated, the nutritive resources that sustain them dwindle to regulate their population. Where human preference wars against healthy families, the families that sustain a neighborhood, community or nation are decimated through barrenness, poverty, disease and war.

God's blessing is upon whatever He considers natural and His curse is upon our destructive, unnatural processes and preferences. He has designed nature to be a blessing. Whatever resists or opposes the perpetuation of that natural blessing is eventually consumed or destroyed by it. War will never generate peace, sterility will never produce fertility, greed will never reproduce generosity, selfishness will never reproduce love, and exploitation will never reproduce conservation.

Nature is both meek and tenacious. When threatened, it takes the meekest possible road. When left alone its tenacity erodes even the most durable of human monuments. Though it is so delicate in the hands of men, yet, nature will prevail long after time has erased the last footprint of mankind from the earth. Ultimately, nature is inescapable.

To enjoy natural, regenerative blessings here on earth, mankind must cooperate with nature and yield to nature's God. No amount of defiance or human engineering will ever erase God's natural blessing. Nature is a reflection of the meek and the indomitable character of the Creator. Nature is bigger than man's pride and presumption. The sooner we come to this realization, the sooner we'll be able to return to living in harmony and balance with God's nature.

Michael Hennen

The Other Economy

I know everyone is worried about the economy. It is definitely on the ropes, and there is cause for concern. I have to say, though, that there is another economy that concerns me more deeply. The one we hear about every day that is sputtering and failing is the legal economy. What gets me is the illegal economy.

To what am I referring? Well, as missionaries, we have lived on 4 continents and visited others. Since we are ministers, we have met and ministered to the needy in all these societies. There is a hidden economy, the economy of misery, that pervades this world. I think some people gleefully watch the failing economies of the world, as if they are getting their come-uppance, but if the legal ones fail, I hate to think of the illegal ones taking over.

There is the hidden economy of drug trafficking. Rebels and terrorists worldwide fund their evil deeds with the money made on heroin and cocaine. There is the hidden economy of the sex trade. Children in Thailand and women all over the world are trapped in this dark underworld of mafia and prostitution. There is the hidden economy of weapons dealing. Secret pacts and hidden agendas which are publicly refuted, are very real and very much taking place in many places of the globe. There is the hidden economy of poaching. Animals and plants are at risk in many parts of the world from the unscrupulous business of selling animal parts and skins, and taking plants out of their environment to sell to the uninformed peoples of the world. There is the hidden economy of exploitation. In many places, people work for wages that are so low it makes them virtual slaves in the sweat shops of designer products. And there is the economy of slavery, still very much alive in Sudan, Turkmenistan, and other places. What is hidden is much worse than just the greed we see on Wall Street.

Our attention is turning to local economy. Here we find accountability, and we are able to take care of our neighbors so that no one is hungry or without shelter. We are longing for community, in which neighborliness abounds, the caring for one another like brothers and sisters in the Lord. The world's economies, both legal and illegal, will be judged by the Lord. In the midst of judgment, may we wake up to the opportunity to establish a glimpse of heaven here on earth, taking care of one another in the love of the Lord. 

Shabbat

This is the first Shabbat of this New Year. As we lit the candles at sunset, we thanked the Lord for this new beginning, for the understanding that Yeshua is the Messiah, for the message inherent in the Scriptures and symbolized by the lighting of the two Shabbat candles: God is the Creator and He is our Redeemer. The rabbis say that the candles of Shabbat are a testimony about God's two great acts: creation and redemption.

Yeshua is the light of the world. May HIs light shine in every heart and every home this year.