Sunday, May 26, 2013

Oppressor and Oppressed

This story comes from a sermon on Jeremiah 29:11 by Nathan Colquhoun (1/11/10):

Here is an example of someone who tried to do what Jeremiah was telling Israel to do.
Mike Pfotenhauer is a man who started a backpack company called Osprey.  You have probably heard of them because they make great backpacks.  If you are serious into hiking, mountain climbing, then you would most likely be using an Osprey backpack.  Eventually they got pretty good that they moved to Colorado and bought an old factory outside a Najavo Native reserve.  They did their best to hire almost all local people for their workforce from the reserve.  They even got profiled in Fortune Magazine for being one of America’s best companies.  They keep growing bigger an bigger.  They were one of the first companies to start integrating recyclable materials into their packs and they kept innovating and coming up with new ideas.
The hard part is that other companies started coming in and offering backpacks for really cheap because they were making stuff cheaper overseas and the competition started getting really tough to actually sell backpacks so they had to start making layoffs and it was hard to keep up.  So eventually they made the decision to shift some of their production overseas to Vietnam.  Now we all know about overseas production and the types of conditions that the workers go through a lot of times just so we can get low prices on all of our stupid stuff we buy.  They have to work very long hours, under harsh conditions and for very little pay.  So Mike and his wife decide that if they are going to do this, they want to do it right.  So they move overseas so that they can be with the people who will be building their product.  They packed up their family, and moved to Vietnam so that they themselves could experience first hand the conditions in which they were asking people to work.
Where the average wage in Vietnam is $40, they pay an average of $80 a month.  Where the average work week is 63 hours, Osprey’s average is 48 hours.  Osprey pays time and half for overtime and double time for holidays.  This is all going on where their top boss is working alongside of them in the same community and living in the same conditions.  Mike was unwilling to exploit people just to increase his bottom line and keep his business in tact.  Mike chose to understand and be with the people he would typically be oppressing.  Not only that, he chose to pick up everything he knew and was comfortable with and built a house and planted gardens in and amongst them.

[http://www.nathancolquhoun.com/2010/01/11/building-houses-and-planting-gardens-a-sermon-on-jeremiah-29]

Saturday, April 13, 2013

From the Inside Out


Pastor Anthony Evans tells about the night that darkness descended on New York City during the blackout of 2003. It was a chaotic night, you may remember. Evans happened to be there that night. Manhattan, including Wall Street and the United Nations, was completely shut down, as were all area airports and all rail transportation including the subway.
There was one exception to that darkness. Evans happened on a restaurant where people were lined up to get hot food. He reports that in this dark situation there was this one place with all this light and joy and music and laughter and excitement. He went over to the assistant manager and said, “Mister, I don’t understand. It’s dark everywhere. The airport is right over there and it’s dark. My hotel is right over yonder and it’s dark too. Everything is dark, and yet you are lit up like a Christmas tree. How can this be?”
The manager said, “It’s really fairly simple. When we built this [place], we built it with a gas generator. We’ve got power on the inside that is not determined by circumstances on the outside. Even though there’s nothing happening out there, there’s plenty happening in here.”
Anthony Evans goes on to say, “When you accepted Jesus Christ, He came into the inside. So what’s happening on the outside shouldn’t determine whether or not you’ve got a lighthouse on the inside. What’s happening out there shouldn’t determine your joy. God has given us a generator of life and liberty in our souls – through our relationship with Jesus Christ. We don’t have to live our lives determined by life’s circumstances.”