David Platt, I’ll See Your $50,000 and Lower You $11,500

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Just received my copy of David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream from amazon.com in the mail today. Can’t wait to finish writing my own book (just two more weeks and two more chapters to go…) so I can read it, along with the 38 other books that I ordered but could not read while in my self-imposed writing cocoon.

I imagine I’ll like the book a lot, for two reasons. First, when I was flipping through it I saw a quote so compelling I had to use it in my book:

As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr’s death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died on a cross. Suddenly a martyr’s death seems like normal obedience.

Got to love a megachurch pastor willing to talk like that.

Second, what actually made me order the book was David Brooks’ review of it in the New York Times. Are you reading all of David Brooks’ New York Times columns? Mandatory, friend. Mandatory.

Including this one. Brooks’ review is edifying reading in its own right.

Maybe the first decade of the 21st century will come to be known as the great age of headroom. During those years, new houses had great rooms with 20-foot ceilings and entire new art forms had to be invented to fill the acres of empty overhead wall space.
People bought bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders.

Brooks notes that after the economy “went poof”, values have radically changed:

Today, savings rates are climbing and smart advertisers emphasize small-town restraint and respectability. The Tea Party movement is militantly bourgeois. It uses Abbie Hoffman means to get back to Norman Rockwell ends.

Brooks sees Platt in this vein. He offers several quotes from Platt, including the one that sent me straight to amazon to order the book:

Platt calls on readers to cap their lifestyle. Live as if you made $50,000 a year, he suggests, and give everything else away. Take a year to surrender yourself. Move to Africa or some poverty-stricken part of the world. Evangelize.

I am in love.

My only request is that Platt would consider going with $38,500 rather than $50,000. Maybe when I read the book I’ll discover where the $50,000 comes from, but I suggested the $38,500 as the more appropriate number in one of my own personal favorite blog posts that I’ve done on this site. I encourage you to check it out and, emboldened by Platt, I encourage you to try it out. Or try his way.

Or split the difference and try living on $44,250.

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Apparently Money Does Buy Happiness–At Least $75,000 Worth

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Don’t miss Janey Osterland’s post at WiseBread highlighting the recent Princeton University Center of Wellbeing Study reporting that “increasing one’s income up to about $75,000 per year lessens life’s stresses”.

Earn anything more than that and it’s all weeping and gnashing of teeth, the study adds.

Well, OK, they don’t quite conclude that. But they do discover statistically that wealth is not what it’s cracked up to be. The study’s authors pontificate as to why:

Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure.

Or perhaps once one passes $75,000 one is completely sucked in by what Martin Luther called the “inward curvature of the soul”–the sinful bent that strengthens, not subsides, anytime one makes an effort to satisfy it. Janey provides links to several studies verifying the sad phenomenon we note periodically in this space, namely, that the more money one makes, the lower the percentage one gives away.

John Wesley once offhanded that the reason why rich people become less and less generous is that they see actual poor people less and less often. Perhaps once one reaches $75,000, the only people one sees on a regular basis are people who don’t really need much help.  And maybe that reinforces the mistaken belief that the money is really much more needed in the bank account of the person who earned it.

I was writing the chapter in my book this week on Ransoming the Captive and describing how in the first eighteen centuries of church history it was a regular occurrence for free Christians to offer to take the place of slaves and prisoners as a means of securing freedom for the captive. I wrote about Oscar Schindler’s ransoming of Jews in World War II, and Maximilian Kolbe’s volunteering to go to the gas chamber to spare another concentration camp prisoner he hardly knew. It made me think how much generosity is related to the sights and smells and touches of direct contact and, thus, to love. So this is what I wrote:

It is a customary and not an odd thing to ransom a captive who is one’s own blood. The miracle is not in the act of ransoming a loved one but rather in coming to love the one who is not one’s own blood in the first place. This is the gift one receives through the habitual practice of the Works of Mercy.

Perhaps what happens is that making more than $75,000 a year requires such an expenditure of hours at work that we run out of time for anything more than ourselves and our family. We leave off the habitual practice of the Works of Mercy (i.e., sharing our bread, opening our homes, healing and comforting others) and thus the only needs that are directly and palpably real to us are our own.

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Is Your PR Promoting Yourself? Big Mistake

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Joanne Fritz at about.com quietly continues to consistently churn out the best blog content in nonprofitdom week after week. Do make sure to read her daily–especially her review of The Dragonfly Effect, where she highlights a piece from the book that no other reviewer catches, namely, a great example of PR staff existing to promote the work of donors and volunteers, not the organizations that pay them:

The Dragonfly authors cite how Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation provides a “lemonade stand in a box” to anyone who fills out a simple form at its website. The “box” includes cups, banners, and balloons. Within fifteen minutes of signing up, parents get an email from the foundation’s public relations staff offering to help establish media contacts to promote the lemonade stand locally. Parents receive a press release template which they can personalize.

Did you catch that last part–an offer from the nonprofit’s PR staff to promote your child’s lemonade stand locally? That is so profoundly cool that I almost regret that our youngest child is now 16 and working at McDonald’s, leaving little time for lemonade. Well, that and the onrushing Colorado winter (there’s snow on Pikes Peak today) puts demand for cold drinks in the deep freeze.

But when you think about it, what really would PR be for in this day and age if it wasn’t for promoting the work of your champions? You’re certainly not still using your newsletter to promote your own organization…are you?

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