**We Aren’t Getting Healthier and Living Longer**

Americans, at least in the past, have crowed about how good our health is - that we’re living longer and feeling better than most everyone else in the world, and we’ve bragged about how good our diet is compared to the rest of the world.

Wrong!

There are now a number of studies, one just out*, that say the reverse is more likely to be true, and it looks like once again our boasting has been filled with more hubris than truth.

The reality is, that after a generation of increasing life spans and improving health, a number of studies have shown that trend is reversing - and researchers are worried. Although our most elderly citizens are in fact living longer than in the past, younger people are not so lucky. They are in significantly worse health than the previous generation, by their own report, and this is a strong predictor of life span – the poorer one reports their health to be, the shorter their actual life expectancy is.

The self-reports examined in the new studies show that more people are having more difficulty with even the most basic day-to-day activities of daily living like climbing the stairs and getting up out of a chair; far more report having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes than ever before, and disability rates among the younger generation are rising fast.

Many of these problems can be tracked directly to the obesity epidemic: two thirds of all Americans are overweight! We’re eating far too much of the wrong stuff and we’re becoming more and more physically lazy.

When is the last time you didn’t use the remote instead of walking to the TV to do it manually? How many times do you use the handicap automatic door opener in a large building instead of opening it by hand? Do you always use the elevator instead of the stairs? Do you drive to the corner store instead of walking? And there are many more questions we need to ask of our selves.

Fat tastes good doesn’t it? In fact our favorite meals are pretty much fat, salt and sugar burgers. When you say it that way, Uggh!

In addition, the baby boomers report having substantially more stress in their lives than the previous generation, including long commutes, taking care of both kids and elderly parents, and that many are working two or more jobs in an attempt to keep up with their spending (most often unsuccessfully).

This again tracks directly to the simple living cure: living close to work and family rather than participating in the traditional car-centered urban sprawl, and building mutual support communities within our churches and local communities to share the burdens of caring for our elders and kids.

This leads directly to two of our basic premises in Christian simple living:

1. Less is better - we need to stop eating so much of the wrong stuff.

2. God wants us to be good stewards of what he gave us rather than ignoring or wasting them – we need to take action to be good stewards of our bodies just as we are to be good stewards of the environment.

* The study was conducted by Beth J. Soldo, Ph.D., Olivia Mitchell, Ph.D., and John McCabe, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, and Rania Tfaily, Ph.D., of Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, and published in print and online by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

It’s Christmas: Live It Up!

I have obsessed about, and railed against the commercialization of Christmas for as long as I can remember, but I’ve stopped doing it this year for two reasons:

1. The Christmas celebration is a latecomer. The church made December 25 the official date of Christ’s birth at least in part to coincide with the traditional and vastly older winter solstice celebrations. It was an attempt to ‘Christianize’ and tame those celebrations which had a tendency to get out of hand. So from a purely historical point of view, it is the Christian fervor for celebrating Christmas that for over 1,500 years has been trying to overtake secular celebrations rather than the other way around. People have always loved a winter celebration to chase away the dark, cold nights.

2. I saw a TV news report recently about an organization that was trying to force national and multi-national chain stores to use the greeting “Merry Christmas” in instead of the politically correct “have a happy holiday” in an attempt to “put Christ back into Christmas.” The program director was interviewed as part of the story, but he was so angry in his strong-arming righteousness that he took Christ right out of Christmas in front of millions of viewers. The interview convinced me that our theological correctness might be making us the Grinch who not only stole Christmas, but actually made it’s real meaning unrecognizable.

So I’ve become convinced that our real job as Christians at Christmas time, is not to try to tear down or block millennia of emotional desires to party at the darkest time of the year, but rather to make our own faith and practice deeper and more meaningful. It is where our hearts are that matters, and we have enough difficulty managing even that, much less forcing all of secular culture to play by our rules, no matter how worthy they might be.

We don’t have to stop everyone else from Christmas binge shopping or thinking the holiday is all about getting a lot of stuff. But we do have to stop ourselves, as practicing Christians, from doing that same thing. And we are responsible for nurturing a deeper, more faithful Christian celebration within the Christian community.

If we attend to living our lives as Jesus taught (a hard enough job), some of those folks who are addicted to consumer culture as we once were (and maybe still are), may want to join us, because it is not only a deep faith that shows in how we live, but also because we are not busy condemning others at the same time.

I guess it boils down to my no longer wanting to spend the Christmas season angry at consumer culture instead of celebrating Jesus’ birthday.

So let’s live it up and celebrate the festival of Jesus’ birth as only Christians can. Let’s put that light up on the table so others can see it and perhaps join us because it’s a better way. It may be a better way to spend our time.

12/20/06

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How Much Gas is in Your Tank?

If we think something is important and we take it seriously, we measure it.

We do this so we know where we stand and what we need to do about it, and doing that is sometimes a matter of life and death.

For instance, we…

· Check the gas gauge in our cars – If you’ve ever had one that didn’t work right, you know how important that can be!

· Weigh ourselves when we’re trying to lose weight and stay healthy.

· Take our temperature when we get sick – it’s one of our vital signs.

· Look at the balance in our checkbooks so checks don’t bounce.

· Insist that the FDA measure a whole host of food and drug safety issues because we don’t want to die.

· Even monitor global warming to the extent that at least once each week those stats are in the papers or the evening news.

We measure what we think is in our best interest.

But most of us probably don’t measure the effects of our personal daily impact on the earth and on other people. And most of us probably don’t measure the results of our own improvement efforts in these areas either. In other words most of us don’t often measure how well we’re doing to live more as Christ intended.

We do think about it a lot, and hope for the best, but we don’t hold our feet to the fire and measure how much we do and how effective it is.

But if it is important to us to:

· Leave a livable, sustainable world to our grandchildren,

· Be good stewards of God’s earth,

· Create a socially equitable society for God’s people,

· Live as Christ taught us…

Then would we not also want to know how well each of us is doing on these issues as much as we want to know how much gas is in our tank? Wouldn’t we want to know if we are making any headway? Wouldn’t we want to know if we should be doing something better to make a difference?

Of course it is much easier and safer for our egos (in the short run) not to make ourselves accountable, even if only to ourselves. It is easier to just read the newest stats in the paper and think that we may have contributed something to their improvement (when we can find some).

But if it really matters to us, we would measure our personal or family performance on each issue we truly want to improve on. After all, most of these issues really are a matter of life and death for millions of people around the world.

And unlike the FDA, you and I can do something about our own performance today, and without an act of Congress.

It’s not so hard, and we would have a much more accurate picture of what we’re actually accomplishing.

One way to start is to regularly take the What is Your Ecological Footprint? lifestyle assessment on the New Community Project Web site at http://www.newcommunityproject.org/pdfs/ecological_footprint.pdf. The tool enables you to score you or your household on 21 categories and then compare your total score to a “sustainable footprint” that we should all be striving to live within. You could take the assessment a step further by creating your own set of performance goals within each of these categories and then re-take the test on a regular basis so you can measure your progress.

Want to know how full your tank is? This is the first gauge you should put on your personal dashboard.

12/18/06

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Imagine

What We Could Become …

Making fewer demands on the planet, building more meaningful lives and having the time and resources to serve others are primary goals of Christian simple living. But to make a real difference in the Twentyfirst Century living simply requires a community of people in close proximity working together to create a more responsible community. We know that it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to live sustainably and serve others.

The membership of many urban and suburban congregations are geographically dispersed, sometimes having long commutes just to get to the church building or visit each other. This makes it difficult to have the day-to-day community necessary to support each other’s efforts, reduce reliance on transportation, share and barter equipment and materials regularly and so forth. So many of us are left to go it alone – a real shame since congregations have tremendous potential to change the world, if we could just change our organizational model and shift our missions and goals just a bit.

But Imagine …

…what could happen if one or two urban or suburban congregations decided to take seriously their mission to live and work together as a physical Christian community enabling them live simply and reach out to the needs of others. They might create a new geographically integrated community in which:

What was important was not their jobs, incomes, houses, and reputations, but building their community, enriching their lives and relationships as well as their ability to reach out to those who needed their help;
Members lived within walking/biking distance of each other, the church meeting house, and their jobs, thus reducing pollution and resource degradation while improving their health;
They shared resources such as vehicles/transportation, appliances, tools, and their skills and labor;
Families didn’t need to have 2 fulltime incomes because they didn’t engage in a consumer lifestyle, buying unnecessary stuff and throwing away much of what they had. They therefore needed less money than the average consumer and thus had more time to be with their families, support their church and community, and work in the congregation’s service projects and ministries;
They made the community affordable for people of all income levels. Even in the midst of urban consumer culture, they created their own steady-state micro economy by providing low cost basic services for each other such as preventive health care, education, elder care, professional services, local food production, real estate, financial services, etc., through voluntarism and by adopting alternative service and financing arrangements for their community.

Imagine that over time they:

Created a meeting house that served as their community center for religious functions as well as daily living activities, and which over the years, eventually housed not only space for worship and Christian education, but also …

A small high quality K-12 school run not only by professionals but also by a cadre of volunteers, thus charging a tuition low enough that everyone could afford it;

Home and community-based support services for their elders enabling them to continue living in the community or with their families instead of having to live in assisted living and nursing facilities. In addition they operated a senior drop-in and activities center. All these services were staffed by volunteers including students as well as professionals;

A restaurant serving seniors, kids, and the local community, again run by volunteers (elders, empty-nesters, kids, and ‘sandwich generation’ adults) and a small paid staff;

Offered alternative financial planning and counseling, responsible investing, home re-location and real estate services, and local job finding services to support more congregation members in moving into the local community and finding employment consistent with their values;

Space for community meeting and recreation functions;

An equipment loan/barter service;

Consulting services and support groups for green living; bartering for repair and up-keep of homes, vehicles, etc.;

Alternative, low cost preventive health care services, rehab and perhaps clinical services based in part on barter and volunteer services.

Created a local farming and food production system to ensure that the community had healthy organic, locally-grown foods all year round which:

Utilized a network of local Community Supported Agriculture farms and other local organic farmers including member and non-member farms;
Managed a small volunteer/user-run food processing plant for freezing and canning local produce so they were able to eat high quality, local food all year;
Operated a meal preparation facility to make meal preparation more time- and cost-efficient (similar to the new Dream Dinners or Super Suppers stores) using the locally grown and processed food;
Supplied the restaurant (see above) with healthy locally grown food.

Impossible? Unrealistic?

It’s entirely do-able, given time and a critical mass of congregation members with the desire and a plan. In fact many congregation already have the seeds to begin.

Such a community would be self-supporting and sustainable. It would offer both paid and volunteer jobs, providing many of the services families need at well below market prices, and all operating outside of the conventional economic system. It works, not because it has to make a profit and keep shareholders happy, but because the Church community wants and needs it, and because it is a key part of their faith and practice.

A key difference between this and various other Christian communities in the past and a few still in existence today, is that a community such as this is geared toward using an existing urban/suburban infrastructure (houses, apartment buildings, church buildings, transportation, jobs, etc.) and bases it’s structure and practice on Twentyfirst Century conventional family and community norms. It doesn’t attempt to be monastic, exclusive, or driven by a single tightly focused mission, but rather would be sufficiently diverse in its activities, incomes, and interests that it could be nearly, if not completely self-sustaining.

Rural communities such as the Hutterite communities have done this, sometimes with great success, but it may be time to make it work in urban America as well.

12/16/06

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