It is difficult to find good fresh produce on the Upper East Side. Even the bad rotten produce is expensive. Not to mention the fact that you then need to lug it home (ah, for those who live in suburbs, you don' t know how good you have it. Try carrying a gallon of milk, a head of lettuce, some meat and eggs several blocks uphill.)

Thus, we're actually considering ordering our groceries online. Yes, it's true. Viva la FreshDirect.com! Check out the website... it's actually pretty cool. And delivery costs $4.95 for all your groceries, delivered as soon as next day morning and as late as 11pm at night (for those who work late.) For good produce at decent prices (and having them delivered to your door at a convenient hour), I think it's a New Yorker's* dream come true.**

*Ok, ok. If you live on the Upper West Side, there's Fairway Market - which, rumor has it, has both fresh and cheap produce. (Doh!) Bet FreshDirect doesn't deliver in their neighborhood often.

**And no, I'm not getting kickbacks for this post. Though I wouldn't be opposed to it... *hint, hint.

A Utopian Self-Concept

"Utopianism enters another area to injure Christians, especially serious Christians: a Christian can build up a romantic, idealistic conecpt of himself and begin expecting absolute perfection from himself. This, too, is a destructive monster.

I am not negating or minimizing sin. But we must understand that the expectation of personal perfection is a romanticism not rooted in Scripture. If I demand perfection from myself, then I will destroy myself. Many Christians vacillate between being permissive in regard to sin toward themselves on the one hand, and demanding perfection from themselves on the other. They end up battered and crushed because they do not live up to their own image of perfection.

The worst part is that often this image does not have anything to do with biblical standards, with the true law and character of God. A person builds up an image of what a Christian is like as his group or he himself projects it, and then constantly turns inward for subjective analysis and finds he does not measure up to this image. Perhaps the cruelty of utopianism is most manifest at just this point, when an individual applies his own utopianism to himself. He says, "A Christian is like this...," "A Christian is like that...," and then proceeds to an inward destruction. A Christian must understand that sin is sin, and yet know that he should not establish himself a model of "perfection or nothing."

In other words, a Christian can defeat himself in two ways: one is to forget the holiness of God and the fact that sin is sin. The Bible calls us to an ever deeper commitment in giving ourselves to Christ for Him to produce His fruit through us. The other is to allow himself to be worn out by Christians who turn Christianity into romanticism. The realism of the Bible is that God does not excuse sin, but neither is He finished with us when He finds sin in us. And for this we should be thankful."

- Francis A. Schaeffer, "No Little People"

A fascinating, fascinating series on social class in America. See Class Matters: A Special Section in the New York Times. Its basic premise is that even in our modern age in good ol' democratic capitalist America, the class lines still exist, albeit much more subtly. And the lower classes desire to, and continue to believe that they can, move upwards on the class ladder - while studies show that our society is becoming more fixed along class lines. It then proceeds to discuss how class manifests itself in various areas of our lives - health, marriage, religion, education, immigration, new status markers, etc.

This topic is particularly interesting to me because of our move to New York - a place where the uber-rich and the barely-scraping-by must sit in the same subway cars. And while I've been fortunate to have been raised in middle-class Orange County, last summer when I worked at the big law firm, I discovered how the other third (i.e. the upper class) lives. After attending public schools my whole life, I hadn't met many of the Ivy League prep-school kids whose families spend summers in the Hamptons and winters in the Swiss Alps - i.e. the super-privileged. And there, as well as in New York City in general, I did.

And it's not so much the money, but the culture and social breeding that tend to sit so naturally upon them (though, of course, money is inextricably linked to culture & social breeding.) That is, they always seem to know what to say, what to do, understand references to all sorts of things that I'm not aware of... in short, the slight nagging feeling that I was different somehow, I now realize, has a name. While not underestimating the differences engendered by my ethnicity, I now realize that I was born into and raised in a different social class.

All of this is even far more interesting when I consider all of this in light of my Christian faith. Should I desire to move upwardly on the class ladder (i.e. if I haven't already)? While I already know what Paul has to say about desiring to be rich, what about desiring to be influential? With money, power and prestige surrounding me, it's easy to get swept up into the current. And it's caused me to pause and consider again what God thinks about the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the knowledgeable and cultured as well as the illiterate and the ignorant. How do I navigate in this kind of place? And how do I reconcile identifying with those we seek to minister to (becoming all things to all men) with Scripture's emphases and commands on being lowly, needy, poor in spirit and meek and thus, blessed?