Our church Wednesday night group is reading Making Room for Life.
The book extols simple living, but not in the systematic, hair-shirted way others have. Instead, it takes some biblical principles as axioms and wraps modern problems around them. The main axiom is the “Hebrew Day”, which you could also rename the “Agrarian Day”. That is, a daily schedule defined, as its name implies, by daylight and darkness–daylight is for productive work, darkness is for rest and individual/communal recuperation.
Frazee treats his subject matter like most self-help books do: He analyzes the problems of modern life, then proposes a cure, then proceeds to show how that cure can fit many problems. Frazee’s problem is the death of community, which he postulates people need to survive. He does a very poor job of proving his postulation, but I’ll let that slide–it’s almost self-evident that people need other people. We’re social creatures, even if you won’t accept that God set it up that way to begin with.
So we’re social creatures, but we’ve cocooned ourselves into suburbs with unknown neighbors and fears around each corner, with our kids unable to deal with the rich, multigenerational society that we once were. Instead, we sub-divide and try to find community elsewhere. He doesn’t touch on it, but the implications are obvious–myspace, chatrooms, gangs, etc.
The solution? Constrain your work to the daytime, build relationships and sleep at night. ALWAYS eat family dinner together each night. Live in community with…er…your neighbors, in a sort of self-supporting, proximity-based relationship so that you don’t have to stress when you need to leave th kids with someone, you just leave them with a trusted neighbor. Imagine ‘Cheers’ without the alcohol, or Mayberry. (Or my hometown, but replace ‘community’ with ‘monstrous co-located extended family’.)
The second half of the book talks about practical applications of this idea, from moderate (trim your workload) to radical (change careers, move closer to work, get deeply involved with your neighbors). Some of it’s ivory-tower (as one amazon reviewer notes), but most of it is practical IF you want to follow-through on Frazee’s “Hebrew Day” approach.
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I’m interested to see how my church takes this book, because EVERYONE at our church is over-scheduled, running from activities hither and yon. You might even call us borderline workaholics, at least the younger couples. The implications of this book are pretty profound:
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Stop scheduling activities after 6pm Ooooookay, there go Wednesday night bible study and Sunday evening services. That discussion night should be fun.
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Some public school homework is just busy-work. ‘B’ and ‘C’ grades are okay, taken in context I really want to agree with this, but kids need to excel academically, especially if they’re in public school in KY.
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Be neighborly. And what if your neighbors are psychopaths? Or crack dealers? Or Psychopathic Crack Dealers?
The book itself is breezy, wordy, and quick. It’s written like an overzealous college paper, with plenty of references, but no counter to obvious arguments–many of his conclusions are drawn from correlations (e.g. coincidences) not well-reasoned or researched causations. For example, people that work at night don’t live as long as people who work during the day. Married people live longer than unmarried people. Religious people live longer than atheists. What conclusions can you draw from those statistics?
Answer: Without constraining your argument, not a darn thing.
It’s not that I disagree with this guy at all; it just gets on my nerves when self-help authors (religious or otherwise) invoke academic rigor without refuting or acknowledging the opposing position.