What is life if not an unending string of changes? Infancy changes into childhood, childhood into adolescence, adolescence into adulthood. Food preferences change. Styles, music, hobbies, routines. Virtually everything is subject to some degree of change.
Enter the career.
My father worked for a major automotive manufacturer for thirty years, retiring before he was old enough to collect social security. My father-in-law retired from a multinational production company, also after about 30 years. The lion’s share of their working years was given to one employer.
I did not follow in their footsteps. Nor do I now.
For the fourth time in four years I’ll commence on a different employment path—not counting the 5-week stint as an Amazon delivery driver at the end of 2018.
Over the last 2.5 years I have been blessed to work with a global church planting organization, serving as the director of communications. During this tenure I came to realize I do not enjoy nor am I particularly good at the directorship. What I am good at and do enjoy is writing and creating content. So, in faith, hope, anticipation, and, to be honest, a hint of trepidation, I’m launching into the world freelance…and other things. My new business is Marty Duren Freelance Writing. Links to it and other things are below.
The Man and the machine
We are likely a few decades away from the body of work sure to come examining how the capitalist economic system shapes the Christian disciple. It is neither feasible nor possible to think—with even a modicum of reality—that cultural pressure and influence inherent in world-bending economic power does not influence to an unknown degree how those of us in the West—and in the United States particularly—perceive and experience our entire lives. As the authors of Freakonomics note, “If morality describes the ideal world, then economics describes the actual world.” It is the actual world that disciples the ideal world more often than the other way around, and Christians are not immune from this discipleship. It’s called “worldiness.”
Christian discipleship is always a journey through a darkened world, growth at the edge of polluted soil, sailing against the winds of the age. There are many metaphors; and these are the ones that are obvious. The metaphors we often miss have to do with the adjustment we have already done to survive our times without even realizing we have adjusted, never mind how much.
There’s an old saw I heard many years ago about how windy it is in Nebraska: Once the wind stopped blowing there and everyone fell down. When you are so accustomed to leaning into the wind, when your whole life develops resisting the wind every day, everywhere, and all the time, you forget why you are leaning forward, striving just to walk. It isn’t supernatural; it’s just the way it is. When the wind dies for an instant, you face-plant before you can adjust. It’s the same as the fish asking, “What’s water?” That which surrounds us (our parents, grandparents, and additional ancestral generations) goes unnoticed.
It is the same way following Jesus in an economic system that overshadows every aspect of life: how we work, where we work, when we work, how we feel about work, how others perceive our work, the value we generate from work (for ourselves and others), when we get to quit work, how much we make, how much we have, how much we save, how much we invest, how much we owe and to whom we owe it. Christians’ understanding of these, in the American context to be sure, are unmeasurably informed by The Man and the machine, likely more than by the Spirit and the Word. We have embraced a counterfeit abundant life and do not even see the stranger in our arms.
Stepping out in faith
I am not an economist, nor am I much more than a scant theologian. But in my older years, while learning more about living the Christian life, it has become clear to me that being in the world but not of the world is more than reading the Bible more and praying more, and that coming out from among them and being separate, has to do with more than sexual mores and condemning the most convenient sins. It includes recognizing, rejecting, standing against the principalities and powers behind the systems we often dismiss as innocuous, but in reality pile heavy burdens on our backs that neither we nor our ancestors could bear, while conflating rewards from the spirit of the age with fruit only the Holy Spirit can grow.
So, stepping out in faith into a somewhat different way of engaging (challenging?) the systems of this age is where I find myself (or better “where we find ourselves” since Sonya and I journey together). It is less a career change than one of discipleship, paying closer attention to the path and, hopefully, to the Word that lights the way.
You can check out my biz site for Marty Duren Freelance Writing, my new homepage, my new blog design, a small publishing company I’ve be running for a couple of years, Missional Press, and my podcast, Uncommontary. If my skills meet your needs, don’t hesitate to connect.
fides quaerens intellectum
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