Last night my wife and I were invited to attend a San Francisco prescreening of the film, Selma. I am neither a film critic nor a Civil Rights historian, so I’ll leave the critical reviews to those more qualified. But I can say what the movie did to me.

I was shocked, shattered and inspired by this film, which attempts to tell the larger story of the American civil rights movement through the lens of events surrounding the Selma voter rights marches of 1965. I did not fully realize the extent of violence enacted upon peaceful protesters by local and state officials. The most violent of these attacks, Bloody Sunday, happened on my birthday, six years before I was born. Surrounded in the theater, mostly by African Americans who were alive at the time these events took place, I spent most of the 2 hours and 7 minutes of the film choking back tears. I was deeply impressed with the persistence of the activists and the moral courage that led them to offer up their bodies for the cause of justice and equality.

I first learned of the Civil Rights movement from my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Barbara Owens, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Minneapolis, where I grew up, seemed along ways from the struggles and segregation of the deep South. But when I was sixteen, my family moved to rural Alabama, where I noticed the divide between blacks and whites and often heard rumors of the Klan among my classmates. I graduated from high school 72 miles up the road from Selma. Even in 1987 my parents had to go before a review board to have their voter registration approved.

On a moonlit Sunday night four years ago, I drove through Selma on my way from Birmingham to Tallahassee. The day before I had been speaking at a church in Birmingham where someone asked me how I could raise my kids in such an “ungodly” place as San Francisco. Taken aback by his question–and for better or worse–I said the first thing that came to my mind: “Well, how can you raise your kids in a place where thousands of young black men and women were lynched and strung up in trees by churchgoing people?!”

I believe as a nation we are slowly learning to value both private and public morality—realizing that how we treat the poor and marginalized in public is just as important as what we do in our personal and private lives of piety. I want to learn better how to listen to God’s voice and act with conscience.

For others like me, Selma introduces some courageous people from America’s history who could be our teachers.

We live in one of the wealthiest economies on earth. Yet many of us feel crunched for time, stressed in our finances or perplexed about what makes life meaningful. Our culture is driven by a sense of scarcity, fear and an unquenchable quest for more. If we don’t make conscious choices to resist these impulses, the force of a materialistic and consumeristic society will make most of our decisions for us. The scripts we’ve inherited about material prosperity are wearing us out, robbing our joy and destroying the planet.

If you are reading this, you are very likely in the top 5-10 percent of global wealth. As people living in postindustrialized countries we must wrestle with our contribution to the crisis of global inequity and ecological destruction. The 12 percent of us who live in Western Europe and North America are responsible for 60 percent of global private consumption. We should be haunted by estimates that it would take four to seven earths to sustain us if everyone on the planet had the same ecological footprint as the average American. Our overconsumption is largely fueled by a debt-based public and private economy. The current US national debt is estimated at $16 trillion. As of September 2012 the average American household was $6, 772 in debt, with the average indebted household owing $15, 328 to creditors. If we feel strapped in one of the wealthiest and most stable economies in the world, what about the nearly three billion people on earth who are living on less than $2 a day?

Our challenge is to pursue a standard of living that can be shared by all. To love our neighbor as ourselves we have to consider how our individual actions affect our sister across the street and our brother on another continent. We might not be able to fully grasp the scope of the problem or offer a complete solution, but we can wrestle with the weight of our relative privilege and disproportionate consumption. For the sake of our global neighbors, the planet and future generations we’ve got to find a way to be less wasteful and consumptive, discovering a more sustainable version of the American Dream.

Related: How Much Money Does it Take to be a Good Christian Woman?

We can be encouraged by the growing awareness among people of faith that the gospel of Jesus is holistic and touches every aspect of our lives. We see Christians of every variety desiring a life of faith that includes being a good neighbor, valuing relationships, cultivating an inner life, caring about people affected by poverty and consciously becoming better stewards of creation. However, this good vision for the church will remain largely unrealized unless practical realities and competencies are addressed. Many of us are too busy or distracted to sustain a life of compassionate engagement. We live lives of hurry, worry and striving, finding little satisfaction in our manic work and recreational activities. Instead of being free to create beauty, nurture relationships and seek the greater good, many of us feel stuck in lives dictated by the need to pay bills or maintain a certain (often consumptive) standard of living. We can’t have it all—the prevailing level of consumption, a life of deeper meaning and relationships and global equity and sustainability. To realize these good dreams we must adjust our values and practices and seek creative solutions.

Few things in life shape us more than our choices about how we earn, spend, save and invest. Most of us will spend a third of our lives at income-producing jobs. How we choose to manage those earnings largely determines whether we are free to serve the greater good. Yet, rarely have religious communities, in particular, done well at addressing money and work as areas for discipleship—other than the occasional sermon about giving. Perhaps we unconsciously tend to separate money and work from the center of our spiritual lives, making an artificial and unhelpful distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, and thereby less important.

In a holistic understanding of the gospel every part of life is sacred and integral to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. This means we must learn to talk more honestly and openly about the details of our financial lives as an essential aspect of Christian discipleship. The gospel invites us into a life of radical contentment, generosity, gratitude, trust and simplicity. We can reimagine our assumptions about time, money and material possessions to pursue a life of greater freedom, leveraging our time and resources toward what matters most.

Three core beliefs can shape how we connect formation and mission with our time and money choices:

1. We were created with a purpose, to seek the greater good of God’s loving reign. Human beings long for a deeper sense of purpose. According to Jesus, we “are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), created to do and bring good to this world (Ephesians 2:10). The wisdom of this teaching encourages us to stretch beyond the mundane concerns of our lives to be animated by a calling to be agents of healing and restoration.

2. We have enough. The ancient voices of Scripture affirm that we live in a world of abundance, where the Creator provides all that we need. “You [God] . . . satisfy the desires of every living thing”(Psalm 145:16). Rain falls and sun shines on the earth, producing the goods that sustain us. We are invited to celebrate this abundance with thanks, to trust God for what we need, to be content with what we have and to share with those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick and lonely.

3. We can make intentional choices about how we spend our time and money. We’ve been given incredible power to imagine, learn, grow and choose how we want to live. Living well requires vision, self-awareness, discipline and the development of practical skills. As those created just “a little lower than angels and crowned . . . with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5), we can make choices to become more content and free to spend our time and resources on what matters most. We think that to make life-giving changes that last, we need a source of energy and love greater than our own. The promise of the gospel of life is that if we do what we can, God will help us do what we cannot under our own strength (Philippians 2:12-13).

Related: Give it All Away…Could Jesus Possibly Have Meant What He Said About Money?

We can choose to pursue meaning, value people, engage the world’s needs and move toward a rate of consumption that is more globally sustainable and equitable. We can be free to spend our time and money on what matters most.

This post is adapted from Mark’s recent book, Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most

Editor’s Note: This post is part of the Red Letter Book Club. It is a review of Frank Schaeffer’s new book, “And God Said, Billy!.”

When I was 12 years old I experience a dramatic spiritual awakening, but within a year it became clear that as an intellectual kid, my spiritual path would be more complicated than the simple fundamentalist faith of my upbringing. One day I was digging through a box of my parent’s dusty old books and fumbled upon a yellowed copy of Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There. In those pages Schaeffer talked about Jesus and the Bible, but also epistemology, metaphysics, continental philosophers, art history, French new wave film and the Beatles. His reasoned and urbane explanation of historic Christian faith helped me reconcile my primal faith experience with an above average intelligence and artistic tendencies. I went on to read all 22 of Francis Schaeffer’s books before turning seventeen. The story of L’Abri, the Schaeffer’s learning center in Switzerland became the model in my imagination for the kind of work I might do someday. My dad actually spent an afternoon at L’Abri before I was born, around the table with Francis Schaeffer while his wife Edith and their teenage son, Franky, served tea.

Schaeffer was dying of cancer in the Mayo Clinic hospital two hours from my house around the time that I first discovered his writings. I noticed that his last several books were more blatantly negative and political, in contrast to earlier philosophical writings, but his reconstructionist A Christian Manifesto gave support to my inherited allegiance to the Moral Majority. It’s what motivated me to protest a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic when I was  sixteen and to nominate myself for precinct chairman of the Republican party when I was twenty-three. After Francis Schaeffer died, I read and followed the work of his son, Franky, who was as articulate as his father, but more feisty and artistic. My two favorite books by Franky Schaeffer were Addicted to Mediocrity and Sham Pearls for Real Swine. In the early 90’s I heard that Franky had “gone off the deep end, ” became a hollywood film-maker, converted to Orthodox Christianity and “lost his faith.” This struck me as a weird and disconcerting turn of events for someone I deeply admired from afar.

Little did I know that my own understanding of Christian spirituality would soon change dramatically. By the time I was 26, having the right god words and being certain of “the truth” no longer satisfied the starved cravings of my soul for an earthen experience of the divine. I went off my own “deep end” and plunged into the rich and complex mysteries of a searching faith, which, like Franky, even included hanging out in Greek Orthodox monasteries.

In 2008 when I was on a 32 city book tour/ circa 1908 revival with my friends Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones I started reading Franky, now Frank’s “tell all” about coming of age during the height the religious right. Reading this book was like reading my own story or the history of my extended faith family. I paid particular attention to how Frank sought to both transcend and include all the elements that had shaped his life narrative. It gave me a chance to look back at where I’d come from and forward towards where the path ahead might lead. I believe Frank Schaeffer went through a spiritual shift towards emerging consciousness similar to what many of us have– but Frank Schaeffer was 15 years ahead of most of us. Doug, Tony and I talked a lot about Crazy for God as we bumped along the freeways of America in our friend Michael’s RV.

So, it was with great pleasure that I got to meet Frank Schaeffer at the first Wild Goose Festival. We quickly became friends. It was like meeting a distant relative for the first time.  I’m sure it didn’t hurt, and probably flattered Frank, that I’d read almost all of the fiction and non-fiction he’d ever written. Frank was very kind to my son Isaiah, whom he gave some peculiar advice with a wink: “get your girl friend pregnant and quit high school. I did and look how I turned out–Painter, Hollywood Film maker, and New York Times best selling author!”

Last year at Wild Goose Festival Frank handed me the manuscript for a new novel he’d been working on called And God said “Billy!”  I came to the festival with a terrible flu and spent the first two days in my tent sweating with explosive diarrhea, giving me a chance to read through most of And God said “Billy!”, which I finished on the plane ride home.

It is one thing to write good non-fiction, to “tell it straight, ” but quite another to “tell it slant, ” conveying ideas through narrative. Frank Schaeffer is a good non-fiction writer and a great novelist. Billy, the protagonist, is an intriguing character, a humorous embodiment of schizophrenic religious America. He is a walking contradiction of motives and conflicting inner voices. Through astute cultural observation and by mining his own life experiences Schaeffer has created a character and narrative arch that personifies the spiritual development needs and crisis of western culture. If Schaeffer excels at anything in his writing, it is in keeping the reader interested with various twists and turns, salacious details, and surprisingly tender moments. The scene in the Apartheid South African morgue is truly unforgettable. The conclusion of the novel is arresting, as Billy is knocked into a white light sanity that is veiled in mystery and secrecy. Towards the conclusion, Billy nearly becomes caricature as the narrative veers towards the polemic, in similar fashion to an Upton Sinclair novel– though I understand this exaggeration fits with the genre and may be an homage to Schaeffer’s literary mentor, Hunter S. Thompson. It is a well told tale that will leave you torn with longing for a similar transformation of character.

Some people are good writers who put the best of themselves onto the page. Frank Schaeffer is a good writer and a great human being. Much like this novel Frank Schaeffer is the embodiment of his personal philosophy and way of seeing, full of contrasts, surprising tenderness and reckless love.

This post is a review of Frank Schaeffer’s new book, “And God Said, Billy!, ” currently featured on the Red Letter Book Club.