If Not Me, Then Who?
Against the "Made It" Economy and the Call of Love
In the last few weeks, a few of my college friends have been minding their own business and listening to their podcasts, and suddenly have heard me on the other end of their earbuds. “Wait — is this Ashley Hales? Like my friend, Ashley?” They’ll write or text me, sharing their excitement to hear someone they know chatting books on The Russell Moore Show that I produce for Christianity Today.
The temptation — for them, for me, for us — is to think that we’ve somehow “made it.” (And for the record, even according to that schema, which I don’t buy, I haven’t made it). Such social media posting, perhaps a sort of posturing and preening, can easily support the “Made It” mindset I’ll discuss below.1
The “Made It” mindset ultimately sees people not as image bearers but as objects. It sees human potential and responsibility as a zero sum game where there are winners and losers. The “Made It” mindset’s end goal is to keep moving up and to the right — increasing freedom, increasing comfort, while decreasing suffering, and decreasing responsibility.
A “Made It” mindset always has shifting goal posts and shifting views of “success” — which is often something to measure (money, followers, influence).
I wrote recently in “Wendell Berry and the Influencers” about how some scholars note that “strategic authenticity… reinforces a consumerist attitude…”. This is the end game of the “Made It” mindset: we present ourselves as consumptive objects, cashing in virtue for a changing algorithmic landscape and exchanging responsibility for ‘strategic authenticity.’ It’s the smarmy networking luncheon of the 80’s turned viral, untethered from our bodies, places, or time.
The “Made It” mindset it fundamentally flawed because in eschewing responsibility it cuts off our ability to love. It is, therefore, just another way to try to earn our keep.
The Call to Responsibility is a Call to Love
We’ve just elected two new elders at our church where my husband pastors. I told one of the men this weekend when we had them all to dinner how much I appreciated him saying these words: “If not me, who’s going to do it?” He’s standing choosing to stand in the gap, not for platform, but for love.
I keep coming back to the recipe for vocation Steve Garber posits — if you know something — if you see a lack, a need, a problem — you are implicated in it. Being implicated in something means that you bear responsibility for it. (Not to fix something by yourself, but to create teams, write a story, be with someone in their pain, make a cup of tea — there are so many ways to be implicated!). And if you bear responsibility, it means that you care. And if you care, you love, and if you love, you’ll bear suffering. Love, to be love, has a cost.
The “Made It” mindset pretends there is no cost. If there is no cost, there can be no love. If there is no love, then people, places, and things can be used and abused. If people, places, and things can be consumed, then we bear no responsibility. And if we bear no responsibility, then we are off the hook — free to live an untethered existence perhaps full of money and fame, but without any real meaning.
That’s why it meant so much to me, to see another man choosing to lead alongside my husband in a local context, who sees the mess of our place and people and still says: “If not me, then whom?” It means he’s taking responsibility. It means he loves.
But what if you have something that’s bigger than the local?
I love the local church. I have seen its scars and bear its wounds in many small ways, but I am also grateful for what I’ve often called the ‘short leash’ I have to it. Being grounded in place — from our bodies, to our neighborhoods, to our churches — is absolutely a prerequisite to love.
But what if you have something bigger than the local? I’m small beans, but I do write books that are read in places far away from my neighborhood. I produce a widely listened-to podcast. I have lots of friends who are or know ‘important’ people in the “Made It” way of thinking.
All of these friends who have not burnt out or fallen away would say the same thing as the elder: If not me, then whom? They all view their work in the world, no matter how big or small, as one of responsibility, implication, and love.
When Jesus shares what’s known as the parable of the talents where some have little and some have much, we can get really hung up on how much do I have. Do I have one talent or two? Have I been faithful with what God’s given? Often, we focus on things to measure and pat ourselves on the back assuming we’re faithful with what God gives us and we’re just waiting for that “good and faithful servant” and the eventual doubling of our assets.
But the real prize for the master’s servants is this: “Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21). The prize is not the doubling of the talent — not the measurable stuff — but the joy of the master. Joy is a reflexive emotion. We only experience joy in communion with another. To enter into the master’s joy then, we must be fashioned to experience love. We must be implicated.
Everyone I know who chooses to stand in the gap and bear responsibility — to be implicated for the sake of love — no matter the size of that calling feels their own smallness. And, no matter their reach and influence, along with humility, has such a greater capacity for joy.
Perhaps the whole problem with the discussion of platform and celebrity is less a function of a particular industry and more a function of our misdirected loves — our shunning the cost and placedness love requires for the allure of the “Made It” way of being in the world.
If you have a wider reach or more visible spot on which you stand, may you stand in that gap well, feeling the weight of responsibility and the call of love. And if your reach feels quite small may I remind all of us that we never know what really has deep, lasting, generational value in God’s economy.
Who knows what small seed may grow a harvest through the ages? It’s likely not what we think.
(It makes it hard for those of us who create beyond our journals and sketchpads to do the math each time we consider sharing our work in wider circles: Does this matter? What will people think? Am I just building a platform? Is this what’s expected of me?).
Beautifully said!
I wonder if the additional complicating layer is the pursuit of the “inner circle” (articulated by CS Lewis). We want to be on the inside, in the know. There’s certainly an avaricious aspect to that. But I think in our lonely age, there’s also a good hunger that’s been deformed: we want meaningful communities where we can feel like we’re building something.
The person who has “made it” looks like they’re doing this: building something in community with others who know them (whether that’s really true or not). To the extent that this longing is good, we should find ways to nurture it. That includes, as you say, heeding a call to responsibility.
Which reminds me of something Norman Wirzba wrote: the call to vocation usually doesn’t strike us like Jesus struck Paul on the road to Damascus. Instead it comes “in pianissimo.” It’s not that God isn’t speaking. It’s that we’ve turned up the volume on so much else that we drown out the call that comes to us from our neighbor.