My wife and I have been recently reading together through Theirs Is The Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton.  The book is a collection of short essays reflecting on the author’s experiences living in urban Atlanta.  Rather than being heavy-handed and guilt-inducing, the book strives to simply cause the reader to question some of their preconceived notions about the poor, and urban culture in America.

Here is a lengthy, but good, section from the chapter entitled, When Winning Is Losing:

My competitiveness reached its peak one day in my twenty-sixth year.  I was flying door-gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam, and we were on a search-and-destroy mission.  Suddenly the ground beneath us came alive with enemy fire.  The intense battle that followed demanded the ultimate in combat strategy, skill, and commitment.  The stakes were never higher and victory was never more exhilarating.  I accepted with pride a medal for heroism in aerial combat.

It was only later, while still in Vietnam, that I began to understand the implications of my competitiveness.  As I flew back from another “successful” mission, I realized that the emotions I experienced were the same I once felt while wrestling or debating.  They were more intense because the stakes were higher, but they were unmistakably the same emotions.  I was taking human life and feeling the thrill of victory.  This thrill was inversely proportional to the agony of defeat — in this case death and maiming.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with a system in which my winning was built upon the defeat of another human being.  When I returned to the United States I was unable to put this new insight behind me.  I began working with disadvantaged people who were losers in a competitive economy.  I saw young men, broken men, crippled by too many years of defeat…And although I felt unpatriotic for thinking such thoughts, I wondered if all was well with an economic system where winning meant defeating another human being.  Could it be that among human beings cooperation was a better way than competition?

I pray that one day God will bring in a new order in which human beings will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.  Perhaps on that day we will refuse the gains made at the expense of others and our success will be measured by the quality of our servanthood to humanity.

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