It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. If you’re like me, you are wondering what awaits us as a nation. Perhaps you ponder our future with a lot of fear and little hope. I find myself wondering and worrying so often these days that I can barely contain myself.

I worry about our world and our seemingly never ending quest to bring about our own extinction. I worry about our nation; we seem so hell bent on spending ourselves into third world squalor. I even worry about my friends in my church who seem so focused on the tiniest sins that they blind themselves to the gargantuan suffering in the world around them. Seriously, shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves with the bigger issues of our time, like starvation and calamity, instead of worrying about movie ratings and Victoria’s Secret posters? It is time to grow up as Christians. I think I’ll go into this further in a future post.

So what is a person to do, when the world around them seems to be falling apart?

I say that it is time to buck the system….just a little.

Here are some things I am going to do:

1. Eat a bowl of oatmeal every day. I cannot afford to go to the doctor; even though I have health insurance. Yup, I am for nationalized (socialized- the word doesn’t even scare me) health care and preventative medicine.
2. Go for a walk for 30 minutes a day, preferably in the desert. Again, I am a teacher; a visit to the doctors office can break me.
3. Repair my shtuff. Why buy new? Fixing is a dark art that brings healing. And screw this economy, it was built on sand.
4. Make my tiny house work for me. Again…screw this economy.
5. Build a rocket stove – I am going to cook stuff outside and that act alone will have a purifying effect on my well being. You know – a BBQ with meaning on a hand built stove, not the soulless contraption you bought to make your outdoor cooking “bigger and better.”
6. Do something illicit – I am tired of always toeing the line for a broken system devoid of meaning. Those of you in on this know what I am talking about.
7. Have recession parties. You bring the rice; I’ll have the ol’ lady cook some beans. Let’s jam out on some instruments and laugh and speak of deep things. It hardly costs anything and is more edifying than a night at Wal-mart.

What sorts of things are you doing to make life “real”