Entitlement

   I recently finished Entitlement by Rumaan Alam.  The review from the New York Times on the Amazon page calls it a 'psychological thriller'.  If you choose to read this book, I think the word 'thriller' is unlikely to be one of the words you use to describe it.  Given that it currently averages 3.3 stars out of 311 reviews, I'm guessing that it's unlikely you'll read this book.  I don't blame you.  There are plenty of other books out there that are actually thrilling.  I also finished Richard Osman's We Solve Murders, which was thrilling.  But if you want a book that makes you think, Entitlement will work for that, depending on how comfortable you are with subtle confrontation.  The book prods.

  It's a story about a woman, Brooke Orr, in New York who starts a new job in her mid-thirties working for a foundation.  The foundation is a newly formed effort by a billionaire who is looking to change the world.  Or manage his tax liabilities, depending on one's perspective.  What makes the book interesting is the way that being around the billionaire changes Brooke.  She begins to see the way wealth and power influences people, the way it changes the world they live in.  She begins to see herself as equally deserving of privilege and power.  She starts to demand things.

  It makes one think about how the Scriptures don't tell us that money is the root of all evil.  It's the love of money that is the root of all evil.  What we choose to love changes us.  As Tim Keller says, whether fundamentalism is good or bad depends on what your fundamental is.  If it's a self-giving God who pours himself out so that others may have life and have it abundantly, then that type of fundamentalism will drive you to fixate on serving others.  If we choose to love money and begin to expect the world to treat us differently based on the amount of it we have, then that changes us, too, and not in a good way.

  I also recently re-read C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce.  It's a tale of interactions between people choosing whether or not to go to heaven.  Those in heaven have come to implore them to choose heaven, to choose to grow into the people God has made them to be.  They talk about how the choices they make will color backwards, transforming the way they see all the choices beforehand.  If they choose grace and goodness, then that will trace its way back to the roots and everything before will be changed.

  The choices we make change us, often in subtle ways.  Our friends notice it, as Brooke's did in Entitlement.  But we often think it's our friends that have changed, not us.  We view it as part of maturation, and attribute things to our friends lack thereof.  But we're always changing, growing, picking up new things and setting others down.  Entitlement is a warning, in many ways, that the power and privileges that come along with money will twist the soul, despite our intentions and the thought that we can control it.  We must be careful around fire -- we cannot hold it without getting burned.