Making Do with More

Making Do with More is the rather ironic title of a recent Christianity Today article about the different reality faced by today's young North American adults in a world of unprecedented affluence and opportunity.

My generation — the parents of today's young adults — learned a particular set of virtues, as did our parents before us: work hard, make the most of the opportunities presented to you, get ahead and make a better life for your children. We are frustrated when our children don't seem to "get it". But does this schema really make all that much sense when the lives our children have are already so affluent, and when the opportunities available to them are so numerous as to be largely uncountable? Has that affluence really given them a better life? Has our drivenness really given us a better life or made us better people? What if our prized virtues have somehow become vices — really and truly, and not just in the minds of our children?

I wonder if things would be different if our virtue chain had ended in a circle of concern a bit larger than just our children. What if, as the world got smaller through staggering transportation and communication advances, our circle of concern had gotten larger? What if all our hard work and grabbing opportunities had been focused on making a better life not just for our few biological children, but for the many others in the world we could have supported had we so wished?

Perhaps there are virtues both we and our children have yet to learn in order to truly live as Jesus' followers in a time and place of abundance.