Pellau Magazine: What if you can't actually make a difference? WOULD THAT CHANGE HOW YOU LIVE IN THE EVERYDAY?

In a 2012 article for The New York Times, author and filmmaker Annie Leonard wrote a column titled “Individual Actions Just Don’t Add Up.” In it, she detailed the tension of those reusable grocery bags we often feel compelled to purchase—the big cloth or vinyl so conspicuously displayed at supermarkets. Somewhere in our minds, many of us feel we ought to be using these bags. Perhaps everyone ought to—what a world that would be.

Leonard did the math. “Sure, it reduces the waste from my household,” she says. “But even if we could get everyone to do the same, the impact would still be negligible, because household garbage is only 3 percent of the waste produced in the United States.”

Managing household waste is one small example, but it’s a microcosm of a much more daunting problem: How much change can one person actually make? It may seem minor when applied to things like reusable bags, but takes on new depth in issues such as poverty and one issue that’s recently resurfaced on the public radar: race relations.

Where Do We Begin?

Joe isn’t the man he was when I met him 10 years ago—selling drugs on a street corner, making a living by risking his life. But as he sits at our kitchen table, his head is down and his shoulders are slumped over his plate of leftovers. He has been depressed for a while now, because the systems in which he struggles to survive haven’t changed as much as he has.

“You coming to the meeting tonight?” I ask, knowing Joe has heard my wife and me talk for weeks about our church’s meeting to address racial profiling in our community.

“What meeting?” Joe says.

“You know, the one where we’re going to talk about how it’s hard for guys like you to change if neighbors are always calling 911 and the police are always trying to search you.”

Joe says no, he’s not going, then proceeds to tell me just how messed up the whole system is. How when it comes to racial profiling, employers are just as bad as the police. How Church people are some of the worst. “I’m worth more to the system in prison than I am out here,” Joe says. “They would rather send me back there than let me work here.”

“Don’t you think we need to do something about it?” I ask him.

“You can’t do anything about it,” Joe says. “It’s just the way it is.”

I tell Joe I know it’s hard for him to believe in change right now. “Hang on,” I say, “Some of the rest of us are going to believe for you.”

By any account, the hard reality of universal, systemic injustice is daunting. Where is one person supposed to begin? Will buying a hybrid car actually make a dent in nonrenewable energy sources? Probably not. So should individuals even bother working to conserve fossil fuels? Is ending worldwide poverty a reachable goal? Perhaps not. So should one person fight for it anyway? Will addressing the problem of racial bias in our neighborhoods have any effect on a wider, global scale? If not, why bother addressing the problems where we live?

For some of us, addressing systemic injustice is too big a task—just too overwhelming. We shy away from the conversation because we don’t want to “get political.” Or maybe, like Joe, we simply can’t imagine some things ever changing, so why try?

Others of us romanticize global justice and deceive ourselves into thinking, given time and the proper conditions, we can fix this broken world ourselves. We fall in love with the idea of world change, yet fail to do—or even realize—the work it takes to bring such change about. In the end, neither of these approaches will get us anywhere.

A Vision for the Future

Humanitarian Paul Farmer, who serves as a doctor among the poor in Haiti, often says the problem with white liberals is they think they can change the world without having to change themselves. This is often the problem with justice-loving Christians, too: We haven’t disciplined our imaginations to see the new world through eyes of faith.

In 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. was caught up in a justice movement he had not planned on. It was his first year pastoring a church in Montgomery, Ala., where he was also a young father and a student trying to finish his dissertation in the spare moments he found increasingly fleeting. Whatever dream King had for the future of America in 1955, it was reserved for his precious sleeping hours. His daily planner was already full.

But when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat on that fateful day in December of that year, King’s eyes were opened to the pressing need around him. He began to envision a better future—a future he would work tirelessly to bring to life over the next 13 years—and he envisioned it through eyes of faith.

In a speech soon after, King declared, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong ... and Jesus of Nazareth was a mere Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth.”

WE CAN'T ALWAYS KNOW HOW THINGS ARE GOING TO WORK OUT. OUR TASK IS OBEDIENCE.

King instinctively knew the justice he sought was rooted in the authority of Jesus. This foundation would become extremely important to King, especially later. “America, you must be born again,” he preached in the months before his assassination. King’s dream for justice was just that—a dream. It could only be seen through eyes of faith.

If we are to see the justice issues of our day through similar eyes, we would do well to learn from King’s Gospel-rooted vision of justice. We do not resist sex trafficking simply because it’s a violation of human rights. We resist because we know trafficked women are children of God—that they and their abusers were created for something better than commodified pleasure. We conserve natural resources not only because it’s good for the environment, but also because we are mandated to care for and cultivate God’s creation.

When we stand up for justice, we are standing with God Almighty—the one who raised Israel from Egypt and Jesus from the dead. We need to know this is a God who can, as the long-standing African-American idiom says, “make a way out of no way.” Like the civil rights workers of the 1960s, we can learn to sing with the authority of God’s people, “We are building up a new world. Builders must be strong.” But we must learn to sing it with a humility that does not always come naturally to people who are used to wielding power.

Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero understood this well. Romero, who advocated for the human rights of his country’s oppressed until his assassination in 1980, once said, “We are workers, not master builders ... We are prophets of a future not our own.” As we engage our broken world, our confidence must be not in ourselves but in the Master Builder who calls us to His good work. This—and not faith in our own abilities—is what makes our vision secure.

A New Measure of Effectiveness

To consider the peculiar way of Jesus in our pursuit of justice is to think not only of the world as God created it to be, but also of the means God uses to redeem creation. While some justice workers cry out for change “by any means necessary,” we would do better to consider how Jesus engaged the powers when He walked among us.

Often, the question of means in the struggle for justice has led Christians to say our mandate is faithfulness, not effectiveness—and this is as it should be. When, for example, Christians couldn’t see how turning the other cheek was going to end Jim Crow, they were admonished to be faithful to Jesus and His way. When, today, we can’t see how reducing fuel emissions could possibly stem the tide of climate change, we should remember the outcome is not necessarily the point. We can’t always know how things are going to work out. Our task is obedience.

The humility we learn in submitting ourselves to faithfulness—no matter the outcome—is extremely important, especially for those of us who are in recovery from believing our task is to run the world.

Again, King’s life is instructive here. The tactics of nonviolence that had proven effective elsewhere were not working in Birmingham in 1963. King and his fellow workers could not see how change might come. His colleague Andrew Young tells the story of King emerging from a meeting on Good Friday and saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know I’m going to jail.” King got arrested that weekend and wrote what became his famous letter from the Birmingham jail. But King’s witness still did not have the effect he hoped it would. Birmingham stood strong in its defiance of integration.

Then, unexpectedly, some of King’s aides told him the children wanted to march. When they were met by dogs and fire hoses, the nation reacted by putting pressure on the federal government to do something. Civil rights historians say the Civil Rights Act signed into effect in July 1964 was born in the spring of 1963 as Americans watched those kids harmed in Birmingham on the evening news.

We can never see what resurrection is going to look like from this side of the cross. But the stories of the saints remind us that, as pacifist theologian John Howard Yoder used to say, “Those who carry crosses work with the grain of the universe.”

In the short term, faithfulness may look like the high road we must choose over and against effectiveness. Yet, as King said, “The moral arch of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

We can’t beat injustice by our own efforts, but with God, all things are possible. In this way, faithfulness to Jesus is actually the most effective means we have for reaching the world we long to see. Every small act to curb global warming, every fair trade purchase, every dollar given to help those afflicted by AIDS matters because we are joining forces with the Master Builder, and He is our ultimate guide.

Creating Within Creation

For those of us who worry how our meager efforts could ever make a difference in such a broken world, we can place our hope in another reality—one which Peter Maurin, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Dorothy Day, said is the task of building a “new society in the shell of the old.” We don’t get to start over and build a new world from scratch. But Jesus shows us how to begin living in a new creation even as the old world marches on toward its ultimate demise.

For an example of how this vision shapes our day-to-day living, we would do well to look to the Underground Railroad of the 19th century.

Long before the U.S. had outlawed slavery, women and men rooted in confidence that they were fighting on God’s side knew they were called to build a new world—one without slavery. A peculiar mix of freed slaves, white evangelicals and Quakers, they worked for legal changes they knew they would not see in their lifetime.

But that is not all. These people knewevery person is created in God’s image, and they began living out the vision within their homes and immediate communities. They hosted runaway slaves and hid them from authorities. Through a series of stations along the pilgrim way, they built a new society inside the shell of the old.

Like these freedom fighters, we have work to do, the fruits of which we may not see in our lifetime. It is within our power to live as if the new creation has already come. We can plant gardens and install water-saving systems in our homes. We can organize co-ops and alternative economies in our neighborhoods. We can carve out spaces where the lines between homeless and housed, ex-cons and community members get blurry or fade entirely. We can do this not because it will change everything, but because every gesture toward justice is a testament to the new world that is coming and has now come, wherever we have the faith to welcome it.:
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