Hopeful during an economic crisis?

Andy Crouch has written a great article on why the fact that life will get harder for us will be a very good thing. Here’s an excerpt (ht: Out of Ur):

I am not hopeful because I envision an easy way out of the
current economic mess. We are entering into the Great Deleveraging,
where an entire country of consumers will have to pare back their
reliance on cheap mortgages and abundant credit cards. (Remember when
your mailbox was stuffed with credit card offers? Seen any lately?) The
national savings rate might even rise above 0%—yes, that is zero
percent, the proportion Americans have been collectively saving for
several years now. But that means that consumption, a major engine of
our economy, will have to decline dramatically.

I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will
be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian
and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote
for neither. (Not for the first time—in 2004 I wrote in Colin Powell.)

I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for
what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious
people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if
anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The
stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else
in the world—and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany
and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and
India—and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with
fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial.
Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude,
study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our
culture, because we live in the short run.

I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get
easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get
harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this
means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly
better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.

Read the whole article here.