Gratitude, Hope, Affordability and Perception

On Saturday the NYTimes carried a piece headlined, “These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable.”  Before I read a word I thought, “New York, DUH, it is unaffordable.”  And interestingly this story of anecdotes does not mention the location of its interviewees at all.  Very blue places, New York and Los Angeles among them, are in fact unaffordable.  In some ways the piece is about perception and location more than actually being about affordability.  It is also quite clearly a Trump hit piece.  But deep within its bowels there was gold.

Here is what caught my eye:

They described feeling that the basics of a middle-class life — owning a home, providing for the children, dining out occasionally — seemed unattainable or required unpalatable trade-offs. Is it worth sacrificing a yearly vacation to save for a down payment, when housing prices keep rising?

I would be a parent of one of these people that keep belly aching that they do not have it as good as their parents.  Here’s what I know with great certitude.  Anyone in my generation made a number of trade-offs, many of them “unpalatable,” to save for their first home, generally even ones that had some parental assistance with the down payment.  There is a basic economic formula here.  Rents keep going up, but mortgage payments don’t.  If you keep renting, that rent will always consume a significant portion of your income.  But, if you make the sacrifices and trade-offs now, in a decade or so, that mortgage payment won’t be a stretch and in a few more years it will simply be a nuisance.  Heck I struggled hard with my first mortgage payments, but by the end I was paying double payments just to save the interest.  That’s how life works.

But then these are the same kids that when they failed in school blamed the teacher rather than buckled down.

What we have here is very narrow perception of reality and a lack of hope or gratitude.  They are narrowly focused on their location and situation, they lack any gratitude for the abundance they do have and any hope for their future progress.  There is no affordability problem, only the perception of one.  But even that narrow perception can be overcome with gratitude and hope – I saw it happen dozens of times in “unaffordable” Los Angeles, including to myself.

Gratitude – don’t focus on the sacrifice, focus on what you do have.  Giving up eating out is inconvenient, but not genuinely sacrificial, unless you are ungrateful about having to cook dinner.  Hope – the way things are today is not how they will always be, and generally they will be better.  Today’s sacrifice is tomorrow’s abundance.

But here is the thing – gratitude requires an object and hope requires a source.  In other words, without God, gratitude and hope are hard to muster.  This apparent lack of affordability creates a political problem in the nation.  When it comes to votes, perception trumps reality every time.  And that political conundrum is created by the absence of faith in the lives of so many.  The church’s failures have become the nations.

Christmas is all about hope, and everybody is celebrating Christmas.  But hope seems lacking.  That means somewhere, somehow we are not getting the Christmas story right.  We may be telling it, but are we living it?  The time has come for the church to call us to live it and for us to actually do so.