Why We Ask (Bill's Take on Share-a-thon)

If you knew how much each of us doesn’t like raising money, you’d know what a miracle it is that we love Share-a-thon.

Share-a-thon (or “Sharathon” – there is no official spelling) is the on-air fundraising event that supplies support for The JOY FM, the listener-supported radio station where I work. Of course, it’s nice to have a salary. But if turning our show into a giant cash register for a week were only to pay our salaries and keep the lights on, I couldn’t do it. None of us could. Honestly.

We’ve all seen grinning televangelists whose emotional and overblown appeals only heighten their incredulous promises of leveraged miracles to those who give “sacrificially” (wheeling and dealing God’s grace: the more money, the bigger the miracle). We vomit in their general direction.

And while we’ve tried to avoid the association, we do get lumped-in with the charlatans from time to time. Still, we have to raise the money to operate. And radio ain’t cheap. It takes around 3.5 million dollars a year to run this place. We cover three media markets, or (as the car drives) over 200 miles north-to-south in Florida. The JOY FM is actually five separate FM stations with numerous, low-power “translators” that fill in the gaps. And we aren’t licensed by the FCC to sell any commercials.

Dave and Carmen (who have both been in commercial radio) regularly celebrate their freedom from playing to an advertiser and from skirmishes between the sales and programming departments. Non-commercial, listener supported radio is accountable to our listeners, not advertisers. A sense of shared ownership accompanies each gift of support. Besides, each supporter’s gift is an investment of trust.

We will never get over the fact that people voluntarily support the station. What? People willingly part with some of their money… because we ask them for it? It makes no sense! It shouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work unless there were something more to it than you can get from purchasing music on iTunes. JOY FM supporters are not consumers. They are partners in the truest sense of that word with the mission of The JOY FM. When they give a financial gift, they are investing in a relationship that becomes more valuable over time, yielding its profits in intangible benefits to themselves, the community and God’s kingdom.

Benefits become tangible in efforts like 20 Wishes, T-shirts for Turkeys, feeding the homeless, shoes for orphans, Homes of Hope for India, The Summer Cruise, and live broadcasts from your favorite artists' kitchen tables. These special programs and humanitarian outreaches are realized through The JOY FM community, not just through the on-air personalities. Community support engenders trust and enthusiasm from others, resulting in partnerships with record labels, artists, businesses and individuals who buy-in to the vision of our using our strength for service.

The bigger picture of the matrix of relationships that form The JOY FM community reveals the unquantifiable effects of daily encouragement, life-support and spiritual transformation. (We could tell stories…)

So, it seems to me when we ask for money, we’re really not asking for ourselves. It’s not the consumer cost-value equation. It’s a partnership to enable imitation of the life of Christ and instantiation of the Gospel. That’s why we ask. In the middle of a large support-drive for a mission to Jerusalem churches, Paul anchored his appeal in the giving-grace of the Gospel:

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. (2 Cor. 8:9)

Giving is a grace – an enablement by God made possible by the poverty of His Son. When we learn how to give, we experience the riches of God’s grace in Christ. That’s why we stress the blessing of God during these Share-a-thon appeals. It’s real.

That’s why we ask.

How Christlike I am Not

On The Morning Cruise we've talked about Carmen's mom several times. The first weekend she was admitted to the hospital, my wife Kimberly and I were ready to drive to Tampa just to sit with Carmen, hold her hand. It's scary to watch your loved ones go through pain. We went through it in 2005 as my mother battled lung cancer. You don't need lots of well-wishers and miracle cures, you need a little understanding and a lot of support.

When Carmen's mom was diagnosed with MS, it soon became clear that their family would be looking at a drawn-out, daily wrestling rather than a definite cure and rehab. Since then, with failed treatments and a new strategy, starting today, using agressive and somewhat risky drugs, the battle has been worse than expected. And Carmen, strong as she is in her faith and character, is at times hanging by a thread emotionally.

You would think your closest friends, your teammates, would be able more than anyone to enter into your experience, feel your sufferings, empathize. But I find myself emotionally stunted, as I have so often in so many personal situations. In times when I should emulate Jesus, weeping at the tomb of Lazarus though he was about to raise him from the dead, I am like an emotional cripple. I've even faced this with my children, using the excuse at a tender moment when I feel their pain intellectually but not emotionally, "Daddy's cry-er is broken."

I'm sure this pychological phenomenon is ripe with possible pathologies. My disability probably has a name and is likely connected to my childhood in some way. But I'm not interested in that. It's also a pathology of sin, selfishness and a lack of Christ-imbued character. The bottom line is, I just want to be more like Christ, more naturally able to laugh or cry with Kimberly or Madison, able to feel the pain of a close friend like Carmen, rather than merely "understanding" it.

My friend Louis sent me a short, unrelated blog on the same subject. The Frost poem he referenced caught my attention (naturally!) and put these feelings into an exercise in self-examination. I boldfaced the two key lines:

I was leafing through my old book of Robert Frost's poetry last night, musing on the death of a friend from pancreatic cancer. I was drawn to "Out, Out", the title of which is taken from Macbeths' "Out, out brief candle" speech.

How cynical is Macbeth's speech! And in Frost's poem, the ending haunts... "And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs".

Our confidence is heaven, gained by Jesus sacrifice and the gift of faith is so out of congruence with the world. I think so much of the world lives as if our lives here are truly "a walking shadow... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Do we live before men so that they can see the hope that is in us? Is Jesus making a visible change in our lives so that we give hope to those in despair?

These are the questions that come in such a time.

Independence: A Thing of the Past?

"What (do you think) is necessary for a nation to maintain its liberty?” I threw that question on the family lunch table on Independence Day.

This is dad’s idea of fun.

The teenagers, as you might expect, seized the opportunity for sarcasm with retorts like, “a Taco Bell on every corner” and “less of these kinds of questions!” But then Kimberly chimed in with, “How about people willing to pay the price for freedom?” and the conversation took on a more serious cast. Freedom, as we should all know, isn’t free.

But beyond the consideration of the price of freedom, my question had to do with maintaining independence. This question is important because every generation faces the opportunity to improve what is inherited. I worry that the America my children inherit and leave to their children may be less free, less independent than the America I inherited from my fathers. And it’s partly my fault.

I was taught the values and virtues of freedom and independence, which were inextricably American. America was “the land of the free and the home of the brave” precisely because we all loved freedom as much as life and had something worth being brave for. We knew we weren’t beyond reproach (this was the era of Vietnam and Nixon), but we still saw ourselves as the best experiment in liberty in world history, as possessing something that needed to be defended and preserved for the good of the world, not just ourselves.

My children are not learning the same lessons or inheriting the same values. Neither are yours. Our universities and academies have turned the self-critique of our democratic society into the rhetoric of self-hatred. My generation is staying silent while the flag of anti-Americanism is daily raised, anthemed and pledged in the media and in the halls of higher learning. The newly-enlightened oligarchy seem to be shifting the foundation-stones of our whole country. Hollywood is helping, by supplying the erosion of constant amusement together with destructive narratives condemning American institutions of both God and country (supply your own list of examples by visiting Blockbuster).

After a bit of reflection on the whole matter of maintaining independence, it seemed to me that I could identify at least three large ideas on which America as a free and independent nation rests. First, the kinds of foundational freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights seemed fundamental to our forefathers and should be considered the same by us. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc. cannot be sacrificed without our independence being lost. Yet today, with various laws and proposals as well as the new bigotry and prejudice of political correctness, we have caused some of these fundamental freedoms to collapse under their own weight, exchanging rights for guarantees.

Second, being a nation of laws, organized around a constitution rather than a personality or a dynasty makes America one of the greatest political experiments in history. The conditions for such a nation to work have included a sense of personal morality and responsibility, along with the presumption of an adequately educated and informed population. We need to meet these conditions in every generation if we are to remain free and independent. Leaders and followers today place way too much emphasis on popularity and individual charisma. What we get, then, is snake-oil salesmen rather than statesmen. No wonder we elect them, then we want to stone them, a bit like the crowd who wanted to crown Jesus, then a week later shouted, “Crucify him.”

Finally, we need to remember that our sovereignty is derived, not intrinsic. We have the right to be independent because we have been “endowed by our Creator” with inalienable rights. Though the Declaration of Independence stops short of articulating a fully Christian perspective at that point, its language can be (and clearly was) read and understood in a Christian framework. Admitting the Christian character of colonial America is not, however, where the argument ends. For the genius of America is in informing an Enlightenment vision of liberty and freedom with the industry, morality, and shared culture of a godly people. That is why I cringe when I hear Christians responding to questions of liberty and maintaining independence with answers like “elect only Christians” or “get prayer back in schools.” Those are theocratic answers, not democratic ones.

Of all people since the first generations of Americans, we need to refresh the values and vision of Americanism in our own minds and in teaching our children. Americanism is not a term of intolerance and backwards bigotry, but rather of true independence and personal ideals. We are a nation of humility before God, laws over kings, and fundamental freedoms. If we can understand these things, embrace them and pass them on, then maybe there is hope for the next generation.