I recently read a post proposing that we were designed or meant to hold and respond to the hardships that happened in our village, not the world, and that we are suffering from our emotional circuit breakers being overloaded. I get it. It’s been an exhausting five and half years…at least.
As citizens of the world, more than half of us don’t live in villages. Based on data from 2020 found at ourworldindata.org, 56% of the world’s population lives in urban settings, 4.4 billion people compared to 3.4 billion who live in rural areas. Here in the U.S., the difference is significantly greater with 83% of U.S. residents living in urban areas, 272 million people compared to the 57 million who live in rural settings.
In 1900, a little over 16% of the world’s population and almost 40% of the population of the U.S. lived in urban areas. Then the shift accelerated with the industrial revolution. And more recently, with the digital and internet age the shift is not so much about the move from rural to urban, but that we have access to the rest of the world at our fingertips on devices that even fit in our pockets. Our sense of the world has shrunken; the meaning of village has expanded.
One last data point and that will be enough with the numbers. In Jesus’ time, just over 5% of the world’s population lived in urban areas.
So when Jesus spoke of loving one’s neighbors as oneself, that would have been one’s neighbors in the village; neighbors in nearby villages which might have meant walking for hours or days to get there, and it included the stranger. How many “villages” would we go through in the same number of hours or days of driving today?
Living in the Metro D.C. area, the boundaries of my “village” are really fuzzy. Is my “village” the areas I go to regularly, frequently? Does that mean the other parts of the metro area I don’t spend time in are not part of my “village”?
But I, and millions of others, don’t just live in a heavily populated area. We also live in a time when something happens 12,000 miles away and we hear, or can hear, about it almost immediately. A couple of centuries ago, it would have been old news by the time it would have made it to us, if it even would have made it to us. So yes, the global hardships and brokenness are at our fingertips.
Going back to Jesus’ point about loving our neighbors…what does that look like today when we have so many more neighbors and what happens to people halfway around the world makes the evening news, if not the morning news? And it’s not just that there are these events happening “over there” in real time that may or may not impact us directly, but also what we do over here, impacts what happens to them over there.
The pandemic has put the truth that we are globally interconnected and interdependent, out on the table. And this is not limited to the spreading of diseases or the disruption of supply chains. Our global interconnection and interdependence means that however we live our lives in our own “villages”, has an impact in “villages” all over the globe. Buying inexpensive items made in China or India where work conditions may be unhealthy and unsafe and where pay may be far below a living wage. Buying plastic dime store trinkets, not just on a large scale for school events, but at the family scale as well. Discarding items because of an imperfection. The number of plastic grocery bags in use. Our recyclables sent overseas, mostly to landfills. Ordering from the same online site multiple times a week. And the list can go on and on. And of course, there are the environmental issues as well which impact the neighbors in the villages over there.
How we live and conduct our lives here, impacts people next door and all the way over there. Over there, where they are out of sight and out of mind. Except that they’re not, because in this digital age we get, or can get, news of events over there, live. And I get it. We all like a bargain, myself included. And finding items made in the U.S. is really challenging. But, we can’t keep bemoaning the tragic things that happen while ignoring that our choices, our decisions ripple out.
So how do we define “village” today when we can no longer just walk to the village center for what we need or to the next village for that specialty item? Who is our “neighbor” who makes our favorite tee or grows our favorite fruit? They are probably thousands of miles away.
It is exhausting and hard to hold and respond to the hardships in our global village. In recent years, it seems to have been especially challenging. The answer isn’t to bury one’s head and ignore the natural and man-made disasters, injustices, and suffering around the world (Note: This is not advocated by the author of the post in the link above). It would be better to embrace that we live in a global village and how we live impacts others; others who may not be neighbors by proximity, but neighbors in the sense that our choices impact each other, even at a great distance.
Consider a view of our village not just in terms of miles to get from one point to another, but from a point in our solar system or our galaxy or the ever expanding universe. As big as 12,500 miles is to the other side of the planet and the villages there, that is nothing compared to the scale of the cosmos. Friends, our planet is our village and all of its inhabitants are our neighbors.
Yes, the brokenness and hardships are absolutely overwhelming at times and almost always way bigger for a single village to tackle. At this moment neighbors are dealing with wildfires, drought, flooding, the aftermath of earthquake and hurricane, refugees are fleeing multiple areas, authoritarian leaders are rising up, polar ice is rapidly melting, COVID is still ravaging the globe, ISMs and phobias of all kinds are keeping people on the margins…yes, it’s endless.
But we need to be good neighbors to each other, in all the ways that we define neighbors. We should want our village to be healthy and thriving. We need to make adjustments at the individual level all the way up to the global village level. Maybe the first step is simply to acknowledge our interconnectedness and interdependence, that technology in many ways, has made us all part of the same village, and that if one area of the village is suffering, the whole village suffers.
I leave you with words from L. R. Knost…
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, and unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.
The image is from a photo-a-day Lenten exercise some years back. The word was ‘World’. The colors in the yarn represent the diversity of creation, and being yarn, when knit or crocheted, it becomes interconnected, each stitch dependent on the other stitches to make the whole…regardless of how far apart any two stitches are.
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