The Whole Earth Is Local: A Reflection for the Holiday Season
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
Every year around this time, I begin to see and hear the familiar refrain: “Shop local.” And I understand the heart behind it, people want to support small businesses, help their neighbors, strengthen their communities. That’s a good and honorable desire. As someone who runs a local business myself, I appreciate every customer who chooses to support my work.
But as I watch the posts roll by, I feel something deeper stirring in me, a broader truth, a wider compassion, a sense of the Gospel that stretches beyond city limits, county and state and national borders. It’s this: all of God’s children have to eat.
If someone across town buys a handmade ornament from a neighbor’s shop, yes,someone’s family close by is blessed.
But if I buy something online from a person halfway around the world, whose name I’ll never know, and whose language I don’t speak, that purchase may mean that their child eats tonight, or that their family survives another hard season.
And if that is so, then thanks be to God.
Some people speak as if “local” is a fence line, as though compassion stops at the edge of the city or the borders of the state or country. But the longer I live, the more I am convinced that this is not how Christ sees the world. The Kingdom of God is not a patchwork of little enclaves, each one insisting that loyalty means shopping within their zip code. The Kingdom is bigger than that. The whole earth is local to God. Every village. Every country. Every marketplace. Every hungry child.
When I hear Jesus say, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me,” I cannot imagine Him adding, “…but only if they live within twenty miles.”
No, Jesus sees us as one human family, knit together not by geography but by dignity, compassion, and shared need.
So while I celebrate the impulse to support small businesses, because goodness knows they struggle and deserve help, I also hold tightly to the truth that every business, everywhere, is “local” to someone. The person packing a box in another country has hands that ache like mine. They have hopes as fragile as mine. They have children who get hungry just like the children in my own neighborhood.
If my purchase helps them feed their family, praise God for that.
If your purchase helps keep a neighbor’s lights on, praise God for that too.
There is no competition in compassion.
My own business is part of that great, interconnected circle. And I mean this sincerely: whether someone supports me or buys from someone else, I am grateful. Not guilty. Not possessive. Not anxious. Grateful. Because I trust that God’s economy is not one of scarcity, but of abundance, a holy abundance that we are called to share.
And if abundance means that someone in another community, another state, or another country can provide for their children because of a purchase I made, then I am doubly blessed. Because that means the love of God has flowed across borders without ever asking permission.
This holiday season, as the world exhales into its brief moment of candlelight and carols, I am reminded of one simple truth:
Every act of kindness, every honest purchase, every fair exchange, feeds someone’s family. And every family matters.
Jesus would not limit compassion to a single neighborhood. He would not divide hunger into categories of “local” and “somewhere else.”
He would care passionately that the little children eat. All of them.
So I will continue to shop locally when I can, because I love my neighbors. And I will shop globally when I can, because I love God’s children everywhere.
The miracle of this season is not that we finally see the world as small but that God has always seen it as one.
And so should we.
Amen.
