Homecoming :
Stories of Living in God's Way
Jonah Blank: The Practice of Advocating for God's Global Village
Like members of the early church, we are all living under the sway of the mightiest empire in the world. All of us, as Americans, often wrestle with the moral obligations of our citizenship. Many of us in Washington, including me, work for a government whose policies cannot always be described as humanitarian.
My spiritual practice is an attempt to make my daily work an expression of my beliefs rather than a retreat from them.
I am paid to serve the interests of the nation, and I hope I do that. But I try, as daily act of subversion, to also serve the interests of people elsewhere in the world who need a great deal of help just to get by.
Specifically, I try to increase the amount of foreign aid going to poverty alleviation and development assistance abroad. Sometimes I try to do this by shifting money from military aid to non-military aid. Sometimes I try to get more funds allotted without any offset—which means asking Americans to pay for roads, schools and medical clinics in other countries rather than here at home.
If you’d like to see your tax-dollars spent differently, be of good cheer: I almost always fail.
So why is this worth doing? And how is it a strengthening practice?
On the largest scale, it’s worth doing for the very occasional victories. Push for a billion-dollar pie, and you won’t much of it—but even the crumbs can help feed a lot of people in countries like Afghanistan.
On the smallest scale, it’s worth doing for the impact it has on me personally: Each losing battle is a moral reminder: If I’m unable to get food aid approved today, it forces me to remember that I’ve got a full plate, and many others do not.
It’s a strengthening practice, though, because I’m not alone. Washington is full of fellow subversives—inside government and outside, all trying to do some good through their jobs, in ways that are not part of their job descriptions.
Without this communal strengthening, it would be all too easy to give up. You’re not going to get a promotion by trying to swap a fighter jet for a food subsidy; you won’t get a raise, or a lucrative lobbying contract. And on those very rare instances when you actually accomplish something, you probably won’t even know it.
But to me, every attempt, successful or not, is a small act of faith. Win or lose, I feel strengthened by the people who are working towards the same end—I feel like we’re part of guerrilla army, fighting without violence, for a goal this is beautiful precisely because it seems impossible.
In some small way, this vision gives me a glimpse of what it might have felt like to be part of the early church, when the empire of the day was that of Rome.
