An unexpected windfall of/for change

Recently the government united on something, that the way to help our struggling economy and the desperate times we find ourself in as a country was to give everyone money. Well as it turned out it was not everyone everyone, but still the government felt it necessary to give out rebate checks to something like 100 million households. When I first heard about this potential windfall heading my way, like most people, I started to think about all the good I could do with this money ... for myself. Some of my ideas were clearly self-serving, like getting some piece of cool new technology, but others had some greater value, like paying off some of my loans from seminary. When I thought about this some more I thought about how this could be a way to help my church out. If I gave this money to my church think about how that would help it out financially. As tempting as that was, I also realized that this money could really make a difference given to some of the many struggling charities that are bearing the brunt of the collapsing economy. Places that are struggle to meet the needs of hardworking people who just need a little more help getting by.

Out of my reflections on those topics I am starting a campaign in my congregation and I am hoping that it is something other people considering embracing, and that is using this "change" that the government is giving us to really work to change things. At Light of the Lakes we will be asking people to pledge some or even all of their government rebates to help with projects around the church or to go towards helping charities in the community. Our congregation is not that large, only 47 members, but if I did the math correctly as a group we will be getting over 20,000 from the government. That is a lot of money to make a difference with. If my math sills are to be trusted, probably some 3 million of the households receiving these rebates will be United Methodist. Which conservative would mean easily over 2 billion dollars that United Methodists could be using to make a difference in their communities. It will not buy a solution to all of the problems of the world, but it would help to show that we as Christians are committed to something greater than ourselves. It would help to reject the consumerism that captivates our nation and our world. With every major presidential candidate talking about how they are the best agent for change, I think we as Christians can demonstrate that in fact, we too can be agents of positive change in the world. Unlike the candidates, we do not need to win in order to change, all we need to do is lose our own selfish desires and let that change start to happen.