Haggai’s prophecy is simply a comparison of the homes of the Jews to the Temple. God says, “Why do you make your own houses magnificent and leave mine in ruins?” The book ends with a prophecy of the destruction of the oppressors of the Jews. It seems out of place, especially since the Persians still had a good deal of time left as rulers of the area. I guess one thing we can take away from it is that God lays out plans for the immediate future and for the far-out future. We join in with the work on the plans for the immediate future, and He’s taking care of the far-out future.

Zechariah’s prophecy is wilder. It fits with Daniel’s later visions, Ezekiel, and Revelation: horsemen, conversations with angels, etc. There are a couple of easier to understand passages.

One is when the people of Jerusalem come to ask if they need to continue mourning the Temple’s destruction, since they’re now rebuilding it. God responds with a question: Have the Jews actually been mourning for what they lost with God? Or are they crying because their own selfish desires aren’t being met? “Judge fairly and honestly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and poor people. And do not make evil plans to harm each other. Your ancestors would not listen to this message. … Since they refused to listen when I called to them, I would not listen when they called to me, says the Lord Almighty. … The land that had been so pleasant became a desert.” He does eventually answer and say that the times of fasting and mourning are to change into “festivals of joy and celebration … So love truth and peace.” God wants his people to embrace truth and peace so that all the nations will be drawn to it like a magnet.

Sounds good! I’ll sign up. Now, how do I get ready?

Know what to look for!

Get to church, son!

Sell what you have and give to those in need.

huh?

Reading Luke 12:13-59, this is what I hear Jesus saying. Here’s my synopsis:

A guy in a crowd says, “Jesus, tell my brother to split our father’s estate fairly!”

Jesus responds by saying, “Why do you care so much about what you don’t own? In fact, why do you care about what you do have? It ain’t going with you!”

He pulled his closest followers aside and said, “Really, you don’t need to worry so much about your stuff, even down to what you’re going to eat or drink or where you’ll find a safe place to sleep, especially if you don’t have control over it. God has control over it, and worrying about it won’t change it. What God wants is for you to care about His Kingdom. How do you do that? Easy: sell what you have and give to those in need. This is the treasure of heaven. It is completely safe, it can’t wash away, it can’t be stolen.

“So, get to it. You don’t know when I’m coming back to check on how you’re doing. I could come in the clouds. I could come in a thunderbolt. I could come with your friends. I could come in rags. Be ready for me! Get busy with the business of my Kingdom! (You remember what I just told you that is, right?)”

Peter says, “So, are you still answering that dude who wanted his brother to share his money? Are you talking to everyone? Or just to us, the in-crowd?”

Jesus says, “I’m talking to anyone who’s following me. Get to it! My Kingdom is waiting! My family needs food! Are you going to stand around and look at the sky while my brothers and sisters starve and freeze? Or are you going to take care of business? Take a guess where the reward lies.

“Don’t get to comfortable, thinking that you don’t need to take care of other people, even exploiting them for your own selfish ends! That’s a sure way to get caught, and you won’t like the punishment.

“Back to the guy cut out of the estate, I’m not here for that. In fact, I may cause some pretty severe family problems. I’m definitely not here to settle a squabble about an estate. That is not the problem the Kingdom is here to settle!”

Turning back to the crowd (and the estate guy), Jesus said, “Don’t you see what’s coming? I’m heading to Jerusalem, and there will be quite a climax to my ministry there. And you’re on your way to court, and you may not get the result you’re looking for!”

One would have hoped that the process of progress would have been kind to our emotional life, making it ever easier to replenish our reserves.

I think it’s fitting to turn that statement around into a goal: “Take advantage of progress for the benefit of our emotional lives, and let progress make it easier to replenish our reserves.” If we take the time saved by using the dishwasher and always turn it into a few more minutes for the career or to get a little more done on the house, we’re failing at this goal. If, instead, we take the saved time to play a game or read a story as a family, then we’re winning. If the dishwasher breaks and we get overwhelmed and feel like it needs to be fixed pronto, then progress is running us over again. If it breaks, and we say, “There’s time on Saturday to deal with it,” then we’re winning.

Why would America’s fifteen million problem drinkers…

This quote amuses me, because of a TED talk I saw recently that blamed the Enlightment on coffee shops and a shift from drinking alcohol (a depressant) to coffee (a stimulant). In the Middle Ages, “in Bavaria, beer consumption was probably about 300 liters per capita a year (compared to 150 liters today).”

Why, in one morning, were nine of my eleven patients on antidepressants?

(I got up to page 85 this morning.)

The examples he gives of margin are the time and space to play with the kids, read books, sleep well, get to know other people, etc.

In the next few chapters, he’s going to talk about four aspects of margin: emotional margin, physical margin, time, and financial margin.

For example, camels are able to carry great loads. If, however, a straw is placed on a camel maximally loaded down, its back will be broken.

I read this and thought about the cliche. Then I thought, “really?” Could one little piece of straw crush a camel? C’mon, it’s just one piece of straw! But, I have no hard time buying that a bale of straw could tip you from “not crushed” to “crushed”. So, if I load the camel up with the bales one piece of straw at a time, it will eventually be crushed. It must be.

In 1980, there were 12,000 items in he average supermarket; today there are 30,000… Purchase a satellite dish and choose from 1,100 movies every month.

Around when I was in 8th grade, my feet stopped growing at size 13. Shopping for shoes got simpler. I walked up and down the aisles, searching for a “13″ among the 10s and 11s. Rather than having every color of every style available, my choice was limited to a small subset. It was usually a piece of cake to find a comfortable shoe that I liked the look of.

After college, no TV was acquired by me. This was suggested by my then-fiancee, and it was an outstanding decision. It has changed the choice between

• Simpsons
• Jeopardy
• dinner
• play with toddler
• work on greenhouse
• work on whatever

to

• dinner
• play with toddler
• work on greenhouse
• work on whatever

Fewer choices. (Really, the “work on greenhouse” thing probably wouldn’t have happened if we had a TV.)

Also, the whole picky eater thing (eating organics and local happy meat) makes a lot of food choices easier: there are usually only a small number of choices at restaurants, and I can skip whole departments at the grocery store.

If I read two health articles every day, next year I would be eight centuries behind…

I wonder if this is what has led to the super-segregation on the internet. I can read only so many words per day, and there are so many choices, that I will just read the stuff that is agreeable. Everything else (all the variety of viewpoints) gets left out because I can find enough stuff that I agree with. The world gets bigger and smaller at the same time.

My first question was, “Are we really any different? Hasn’t there always been stress?” Dr. Swenson addresses this, and also counters himself by asking if life isn’t better with a longer lifespan to accompany this greater stress burden.

“It is obviously much easier for a hard-working peasant to keep his mind attuned to the divine than for a strained office worker.” I have a couple thoughts about this. First, I wonder if I should leave the iPod in the house more when I go out to do work. Second, this statement is basically the problem statement from the self-help guide Getting Things Done, in which David Allen lays out strategies for keeping the mental load under control.

At one point I quipped that one of the nice things about working together was we got in each others’ way and needed to slow down occasionally. I had earlier been thinking about how we could arrange ourselves in the barn to maximize our efficiency, but once we were working, it was nice to lay my fork on the ground and wait until the door was clear. As I thought about my momentary slacking, I remembered this spring when I nearly threw out my back shoveling manure.

That time, I had been working alone, so there was no one in the way. I kept getting bigger and bigger scoops, and eventually my back said “no more”. I hobbled into the house and spent the rest of that weekend trying to be much more gentle to my back.

As I thought about that experience, I decided that, while efficiency enables more production, it also has the tendency to wear things out more quickly. Here, I’m equating “efficiency” with increased throughput of some kind: me shoveling more pounds per minute; a toy being less expensive to make; a car running faster than it was designed to.  I juxtaposed, in my mind, the strain of thought that I hear frequently from economists that trade and specialization are the route to prosperity (i.e. more efficiency means more abundance for everyone), with the notion that efficiency tends to wear things out much more quickly.

Take, for instance, my back. If I move 4,000 pounds of manure an hour, I’m likely to destroy my back within a matter of hours, and could damage it enough that I can’t really move any manure ever. If I move 1,000 pounds an hour because I take a breather every couple of minutes, I’m likely to stay strong and maybe even get stronger over the long term. I guess it’s a question of sustainability.

Chapter 3 of Margin ends by talking about limits. Dr. Swenson argues that, in the last century or two, the rate of progress has transitioned the world from linear growth with abundant margin (and therefore the apparent capacity for limitless growth) to exponential growth with minimal to negative margin.

The sustainability thought is a large part of why our life is like it is: why we raise food the way we do, why I don’t work crazy overtime, why we don’t carry consumer debt.

When you look at progress and try to forecast the future, the temptation is to view exponential growth through the lens of a world with abundant margin: we haven’t run out of resources yet, but our rate of consumption appears to be hurling us in that direction.

In the introduction, Swenson outlines the book: Diagnosis: Pain; Prescription: Margin; Prognosis: Health. Those are the three sections of the book: Pain, Margin, Health.

In the second chapter, he talks about the pain of progress. He says that progress maximizes physical and intellectual well-being, but neglects relational, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

Reading this book, I have thought about Getting Things Done, by David Allen, and How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. GTD seems to look at the same subject as Margin: people have too many things to do. GTD had a zen feel to it, but it also had some very practical advice about how to “be where you are.” HTWFAIP is just about being a person — if you’re nice to people and get to know them, you’ll “win friends and influence people” — i.e. you’ll have an easier time solving problems with them.

Maybe my thoughts about those books is just because I feel like they had an impact on how I (try to) approach life, and I hope that Margin has a similar impact.

Also, on a somewhat unrelated note, I met a lady on Friday who works with or is planning to work with ex-cons. The plan is for them to harvest fruit off of trees that nobody else picks, and eat and sell what they collect. I, for one, think that’s awesome, and wish there was a way we could make our farm available for gleaning.

“When you are harvesting your crops and forget to bring in a bundle of grain from your field, don’t go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all you do. When you beat the olives from your olive trees, don’t go over the boughs twice. Leave the remaining olives for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. When you gather the grapes in your vineyard, don’t glean the vines after they are picked. Leave the remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why I am giving you this command.”