The Reality: Cities across the United States are scrambling the provide the mass transit demands of people who are trying to lessen the burden caused by high fuel prices.
The Thought: If you've ever spent time in Europe, you can't help but notice how compact everything is and how tightly it's integrated with mass transit, an approach to development that is obviously linked to a smaller amount of land to build on. This stands in contrast to the model in the United States where there was seemingly unlimited land and, to accompany it, an unlimited amount of affordable resources. As a result we have suburban sprawl and multi-hour commutes with everyone driving their own vehicle. However, now that resources are expensive and, depending on who you ask, becoming scarce, our mindset has changed and, at some level, we're trying to undo what's been done by, among other things, adding in multi-billion dollar mass transit systems.
The Question: There are many areas of our lives where we can, based on the circumstances of the moment, make a decision or series of decisions that we have to try and undo at greater expense later on. What do you do to try and foresee potential issues so you can make better choices in the present?
Benefits to Expensive Gas
TIME offers 10 benefits to $4 gas: http://time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1819594_1819592,0...
Seems to me that many of these could be "forced stewardship" (as opposed to Gospel driven stewardship). Thoughts?
Maybe it's the secret
Maybe it's the secret conspiracy person in me that thinks about those 'forced' stewardship as...was this planned? Probably not, after all those 10 benefits are many times things we should have been doing the whole time. I do like the 4 day workweek! And the when I think about suburban sprawl I sometimes think about how Lewis describes Hell (I may explain more on the other forum) as people continuously moving farther and farther away from each other creating a sprawl of empty homes.
My question: Is 'forced stewardship' bad? I don't think so, if you look at it from a left hand kingdom kind of thing. But the question then becomes what kind of morality (stewardship in a sense is a morality) is being placed?
left hand stuff
For those who aren't familiar with the term, "left hand kingdom" is a way that Luther described the word that we live in. Here's a blog to explain this a bit more: http://joeburnham.com/2007/08/27/blurring_kingdoms
So, forced stewardship is good in the sense that it prompts us to live better lives that are more loving to our neighbor. This makes the world better for all of us.
However, when we're living loving lives and being generally good people, it can also cause issues in the right hand kingdom in that, when we're not jacked up, we're less likely to realize how much we need Christ.