Lessons from The Hole, Part 4: A Dollar a Day

This is my shoe rack. My summer shoe rack. My winter shoes are packed in a Rubbermaid and stashed in the back of a basement closet. Come Labor Day, I switch them out (I hold fast to the “no open-toe shoes” after Labor Day rule), along with my clothes. My shoe rack and bedroom closet are too small to contain both summer and winter shoes and clothes.

Or perhaps I should say the opposite: I have too many clothes and shoes to squeeze into my closet and shoe rack.

Richard Stearns has me thinking about abundance lately. Or, more accurately, overabundance. Consider these statistics, from The Hole in Our Gospel:

• 2.6 billion people live on less than $2 a day.

 • 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day.

• 1 billion people in the world live without access to clean, safe water.

• 9 million people die every year of hunger or its related causes.


Compare those statistics to this one:


• The average American lives on $105 a day (and this is based on an annual salary of $38,611 – certainly not affluent by our standards).

This is the point at which I step on my high horse, so willing am I to point out the overabundant lifestyles of others.

“Do they really need flat screen TVs in every room,” I ask myself? “Does she really need a Tory Burch purse?” “Do they have to build a brand-new house? What was wrong with the perfectly good house they already own?”

It’s so easy for me to look disdainfully at other lifestyles – so easy for me to recognize the speck in another eye, and miss the plank in my own.

Take, for instance, this photo:

This is the back of my mini-van, stuffed full with items to bring to the Goodwill. At first glance you might think, “Well, that’s good. At least she’s donating her unused items to those in need.”

That’s what I tell myself, too. But the bigger question is why I have so many unused items in the first place. Why do I need to purchase more stuff? Why do I need 12 pairs of summer shoes? Fifteen purses?

I’m inclined to argue that I deserve such wealth. I work hard, after all. My husband works hard. Our parents worked hard. Our grandparents worked hard. Don’t we deserve to enjoy the fruits of labor? Didn’t we earn this lifestyle?

Stearns questions this attitude:

"Think about your own life. How successful would you or your family have been if you had lived in a place where there was no clean water and one quarter of all children died before their fifth birthday? These are the daily realities of the world’s poor. No matter how hard they work, how gifted and talented they are, or how big their dreams, the poor have few choices and even few opportunities to fulfill their God-given potential."

Stearns has pinpointed exactly where my attitude goes awry when I think about “the poor.” You see, it’s easy for me to assume that poor people are poor because they don’t work as hard – that they somehow deserve to be poor.

This, of course, is profoundly untrue. Stearns quotes President Clinton to make his point:

"I want you to imagine what would have happened in our lives if there had been no connection whatsoever between how hard you worked and the results you got, because that is exactly the situation faced by the more than one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. The connection between how hard they work and the result they will get has been broken."

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but this is a revelation for me. I’ve never thought about the fact that for most of the world’s poor, hard work doesn’t make a bit of difference. These people work hard. Harder than I work. Harder than my husband works.

The distinction is that they are trapped within social, cultural, political and economic systems that are broken, that make it nearly impossible for them to succeed.

A dramatic disparity exists, that much is fact. So what’s the solution?

I go back to the verse I quoted last week, from 2 Corinthians:

“Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, as it is written: ‘He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little.’” 2 Corinthians 8:13-15

I believe that God expects me – all of us living overabundant lives – to even out the imbalance, to stand in the gap. To fill the hole.

Maybe this means something small: I look at my 15 purses and decide, no, I don’t need another, no matter how cute. Or I buy fewer iced coffees at Starbucks, stash the money in an envelope, and write a check to a global non-profit at the end of the year.

Or perhaps it means something more dramatic: I donate my time at the local soup kitchen.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what this means for me. But I'm working on figuring it out.

Have you ever thought about how the simple act of your birth determined so much about your future?

This post is Part 4 in my five-week series "Lessons from the Hole" (a response to Richard Stearns' book The Hole in Our Gospel).

Next Week's Topic: The Role of the Church