"For Love of Neighbor" is a new documentary film offering a hopeful vision for Christian engagement in politics. Click here to learn more.

The Pearl of Great Price

Platform is an intriguing title for the student-made video that took silver in iNRB’s 36-hour student video competition, sponsored by V&C two weeks ago in Nashville. Its creators surely deserve extra credit for reading not only American Exceptionalism but also Coming Apart, in which Charles Murray carefully documents the growing class divide in American society.

That inequality is clearly evident at Viva Microfinance, a small nonprofit where the boss, appropriately named Richlin Willard—wearing brilliant make-up and a well-pressed suit—gives her subordinate colleague a callous stare and cold shoulder. One can only imagine Miss Willard’s salary to be seven times that of her colleague, who appears ironically to work seven times harder on a noble cause.

But when Willard takes her eye off the prize, she learns a hard lesson: “her” organization, “her” staff, and “her” cause can disappear in a heartbeat. Just as Pharaoh discovered millennia ago in mistreating “his” people Israel, in heaven and earth there is only one—Jesus Christ—who can rightly look upon the whole of the creation and declare, “Mine!” The rest of us are mere stewards.

How are you using your own platform? One thought: instead of envying the lives (or inwardly coveting the resources) of those with more, our real task is to focus on what we’ve been given and to use our talents, however many or few, for Christ and his kingdom. Or, put another way, on purpose.