I HATE THIS WORLD! EVERYTHING IS SHIT! EVERYWHERE I TURN I SEE EVIL! ABUSE OF PEOPLE ON THE SPECTRUM! VIOLENCE AGAINST LGBTQIA++ PEOPLE! GREED! AVARICE! IT’S ALL JUST HORRIBLE! FALLING WIND MY ASS!
You done yet?
Because God made this world with both dark and light, with complementary opposites, with beauty and ugliness sitting right next to each other. Tantrums haven’t changed that. They won’t. No system, law or resource redistribution will change that.
We keep inventing better systems like they’re the answer. Make the rules perfect and everything will be perfect. Let the people control it instead of the evil capitalists or the government and they’ll do a better job. Take from those who have too much and give to those who have too little. Robin Hood it. Redistribute.
Every single one of those still runs through us. Broken and blessed. Capable of beauty and capable of real trouble. Pure Democracy doesn’t rewrite that. Neither does redistribution. The same people who already do bad things and honest mistakes are still the ones operating the new machine.
Of the religions I know, only one actually claims grace is the only answer. The rest keep chasing God’s approval and never promise redemption. They treat the problem like something we can outwork or purify. Grace says the problem is deeper than that, and the fix isn’t another system we design.
Tantrums won’t change the world. Better systems won’t either. Stop soiling social media with your demands that the “other” come correct so you can be at peace. There is no amount of wealth sufficient to resolve resource disparity. And systems have one irreducible problem: us.
Windfalls
Yesterday in church, at the end of service, walking back to my seat, there was a gift card on my seat. Awesome! Right? Kind of. When you are down this low, every dollar counts. And every dollar is a conflict. Fast money habits tempt me to binge it out. Spend the whole gift card on one glorious grocery run. Buy all the indulgent things I refrain from getting while sticking to my budget. I lived that way for a long time.
At the other end, treat the gift card like a holy relic. Put it in my dresser drawer at the bottom of my stack of payment cards. Keep it until circumstances or temptation get loud enough to take it to the store and binge it out because “emergency”.
Some of you will fall into either bucket. You’ll binge it out, enjoy the product of the binge, and then fall back into your regular misery once it’s all consumed. I’m that guy. Binging it out will take me less than an hour. The product of that binge will be gone by the time Sunday rolls around again. There is no gain for me repeating the same insanity and expecting different results.
Or make it an icon. Put it in a cherished place, prominently displayed, and pray that I never spend it. Tell myself it’s only for emergencies. And one day, when Jesus, myself and my Dad are at a beer joint in heaven eating pizza over beers, have an answer to, “Why didn’t you use the gift card I gave you.” Awkward.
The harder, middle way—pray into what will help me grow as a disciple of Christ. Choose what I need that has been on pause since the first week of July 2026. Take care of some of that with the gift card. Then put it on the stack of payment cards I have in my top dresser drawer and save it for later in the month. I’ll tell you the result. I binged a little and left myself a balance on the card for later in the month.
Tres Fantasías
Three wishes, no genie. Perfect systems, perfect laws decided by the workers, and perfect resource distribution. It’s a promise repeated long before Karl Marx. Ideas about holding resources in common go all the way back to Acts 2. A decade ago I published “Good Times” to answer my friend’s question about why collectives fail. Taxi Unlimited isn’t *every* collective. There are thriving collectives and Anabaptist communities.
Taxi Unlimited’s existential problem was one every utopian project shares—the quality of the people involved. Strangely, the ability to spend daylight hours harassing ICE officers and build a criminal record isn’t a resume that builds toward functional living. Taxi Unlimited’s members devoting substantial time and effort to opiate and marijuana sales didn’t help it thrive. Addiction slowly ate the collective.
Sistemas Perfectos
First wish, perfect systems. So the claim goes, the system is broken. Dig into that and the one having a tempest because the system is oppressing them can’t name specifics. It’s just “the system” that is ruining their life. So the wish is to perfect the system. Perfect it how? So that the warm blooded, walking storm can doom scroll their life away while extracting money from OF dolts.
Or perfect it so *those* people, those bougie people, are reduced to size and I am elevated. So that things are more fair. One question—who decides fair? What if the decider decides a definition of fair you disagree with? Is the system still perfectable?
One more, perfect it so that every grievance is finally answered and no one ever feels the weight of their own choices. The system will absorb the consequences, smooth out the outcomes, and keep the walking storm from ever having to look in the mirror. Accountability is so annoying. Make it stop.
Reglas para ti, no para mí
Ok, but . . . what about the laws? I mean, guns are mass shooting black people on the regular. Guns owned by whites, obvi. So white guns are genociding black people, for realz. Like, George Floyd, fr fr. We need to fix the laws so black people can live, am I right? And I need my reparations so I can get out of debt.
Legalism has a long history. Except for one, most religions demand perfect behavior to earn entrance into Paradise. It diagnoses the problem as imperfect rules, laws and policies. Second, as imperfect compliance to perfect laws. The elephant in the room? People. Annoyingly, people are history’s constant problem. Why? Not all people behave. And shut up about, “we all sin and fall short of the GLAWRY OF GAWD.” We know. And?
The Old Testament is a long recitation of what legalism has been like for Abrahamic religions. Within the narratives is this repeating cycle—the people learn the laws, follow them for a while, then start to drift. They drift far enough that God drops consequences. And once the consequences hurt enough, the people repent, apologize, and behave—for a while. Until they don’t. Rinse Repeat
¡Pero es que yo tengo hambre!
Third wish—perfect resources. If nobody had too much or too little then I wouldn’t even have to think about money and I could just vibe and chase my passions without stressing about running out of energy drinks and meat sticks, fr. That would be nice. It hasn’t worked. Trillions flowed from our first world to the third world and actually . . . made the resource disparities worse. I have receipts if you doubt me.
We Are the Problem . . . And the Answer
All three wishes–perfect systems, perfect laws, perfect resource distribution share the same fatal flaw—us. God made this world with complementary opposites. One of those opposites is our capacity for beauty and for evil. There is no perfect system, law or resource distribution that can overcome our potential for evil. Name an evangelist for some flavor of Socialism that has an answer for sin. Tough challenge, yes?
We all bang into versions of this question at some point in our lives—”if God is a loving God then why are there bad people.” I have a two word answer: free will. “If matter had no fixed properties, it would be useless and could not form a world at all. . . Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself,” Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. HarperOne, 2001. Whazzat mean? It means safety and free will exist on opposite ends of a spectrum. More safety means less freedom. More freedom means the possibility of less safety.
The miracle is that over 300,000 years and about 5,000 years of recorded history we still thrive. We thrive with the few who can’t or won’t behave. Our systems, our laws, our resource distribution are far from perfect. Social media delights in broadcasting the more evocative edge cases. Most people, most of the time, are not interesting. Their lives haven’t changed much since at least the Roman Empire, maybe earlier. Even with the hot mess we live in, life goes on.
The Answer is . . . Keep On Keeping On
So what’s the answer? We are the answer. Each of us can do small things with great love, begin with grace until doing so becomes unwise, serve those who can be served, worship with peers, pray, tithe, and study. DC will still annoy us. The seat warmer in the White House will still do it wrong. The messes of governance will continue. And small graces will happen for us like a gift card appearing in your seat at church.
Last thing. One complementary opposite is this: we are, at every point in our lives, as good as we can be, and we could be better. God’s grace, His gift to us, is that we are forgiven even with where we are lacking while as good as we can be. That we could be better is hope for us, not condemnation. 改善 is a Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement”. Rather than a binary, “I’m a sinner, utterly failed” or a simmering worry that we will never measure up, treat 改善 as an opportunity to make your circle of influence the change you wish to see.
Ok, truly last thing. I never could rest easy on charismatic anything. Charismatic revivals, both secular and religious, burn through the culture like wildfires. The heat of them is ecstatic. In the moment they are gorgeous. Then they exhaust us and leave an appetite for more that is harder and harder to feed. Or . . . try, fail, try again, get told what worked, repeat–改善. Over a lifetime. I like charisma too much. So I had to surrender that to God and take the more disciplined path. 21 years later I’m still trying, failing, learning where I can improve, and succeeding.