If you want just the highlights from the last couple weeks, here they are:
Jesus. Prayer. Orphans. AIDS/HIV. Tuberculosis. Extreme Poverty. Books.
If you want the full story, I’ll start from the end of the list and work backwards to ease into it.
The last several weeks have been a blur of books. I’ve read The End of Poverty, by Jeff Sachs, Compelled by Love, by Heidi Baker, Is That Really You, God? by Loren Cunningham, Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia by Jean Sasson, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, to satisfy my need for fiction. I’m almost finished with Love Has a Face, which is very similar to Compelled by Love, but with a different author (both are about orphanages in sub-Saharan Africa… and God’s love).
I hope I don’t bore you by mentioning the books, but the reason I bring it up is because my thought life seems to be spinning around a dual issue: physical and spiritual poverty. My thoughts were only confirmed and added to by the recent trip out into rural Cambodia with Bethany’s staff outreach in Oddar Mean-Chey.
We stayed at Christian orphanage outside the village for two days, and we went on visits to the village to walk around with a local pastor and share about Jesus with villagers. Well, my Khmer speaking ability limited me to sharing about “Hello, how are you?”, but I backed up the others in prayer.
We then went to Poi Pet, on the border of Thailand. I renewed my Visa while I was there, which is a story all its own, and we went with a woman from church there to visit the patients in a health clinic. Specifically, we were visiting and praying with AIDS/HIV and TB patients.
I know many of you enjoy the pictures I’ve shared on my travels, but I didn’t take pictures this time.
I encourage you to see it for yourself, someday.
That visit finally gave a face to what I’ve read about and seen in the news: real, desperate suffering and physical poverty. When I say physical poverty, I don’t mean the sometimes self-induced, mostly relative poverty of the Western world. I mean the kind of poverty that leaves about 1.7 billion people half-starved on a regular basis (extreme, or “absolute poverty” is currently measured at someone living on under $1.25/day).
I think it’s time we all recognized that we are now a global neighborhood. Less than 24 hours of air travel will get you just about anywhere on the planet. Things like cell phones, Facebook, and Skype now allow billions of people to connect within seconds. You could literally be standing in an African village or the slums of India in a day or two after reading this post, if you really wanted to.
How does “love thy neighbor” look in a world where everyone is now your neighbor?
That’s a question I’ve been pondering. Whether we like it or not, every one of us must choose which role we play in the story of the Good Samaritan.
Despite the ability to connect and become a part of the lives of people in virtually any nation, we maintain our distance for a number of reasons. Language, cultural, religious, and financial barriers give us some excuses, and “ignorance is bliss” syndrome makes up for the rest.
We’re not interested in most of the people in the world because we haven’t met them or looked in their eyes. They don’t really exist to us. Statistics say that nearly seven billion people live on this blue marble, but more than likely, we only acknowledge the slightest fraction of them.
So when tragedy strikes the world we do acknowledge, say, for example, what happened on September 11 nearly ten years ago… our hearts and minds are troubled. Most Americans can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out. People proclaimed that on that day everything changed, perhaps even worldwide.
But let’s add some perspective to that. 3,000 deaths on 9/11 was a tragedy.
10,000 Africans die every single day from malaria, TB, and AIDS. And they’ve been dying on that scale for years before and since 9/11.
Most of that number is children, and it equates to something like a Holocaust every year on just that continent.
Are we suddenly stricken with grief after reading that? Will we remember for the next decade exactly where we were on the day we found out? Should we say, “4/26… Never Forget” and “4/27… Never Forget” and so on and on for the rest of our lives?
Or is it such an unbelievable truth that it has no effect?
It’s staggering. It’s unimaginable. It’s incomprehensible. And it is the black mark on humanity that history and God may judge us for someday. Why? Because for the first time in history, the wealth of the Earth is great enough and the opportunity available to nearly eradicate poverty traps.
Yet the world commits the greatest sin of witchcraft ever known by casting a spell of invisibility over millions of people. It’s the same for the modern day sex trade and slavery rings.
At this point in my rant, you may be in one of a couple camps.
1. Perhaps you’re a sympathizer and you’re looking for a way to help. Me too. Let’s find a way to get involved. I’ve got some ideas that I’m working on, which I hope to reveal to the world shortly. If you’re a Christian, pick up a book by Mother Teresa or perhaps Heidi Baker’s Compelled by Love. Money alone can’t save the world, but the love-of-God-in-action combines all kinds of provision to meet needs through compassion… and it could save the world. Don’t just pity. Get compassion.
2. Maybe you’re a cynic, who believes these things are inevitable and we couldn’t stop them even if we wanted to (…corrupt governments steal financial aid, Africa is a black-hole of immorality, they wouldn’t be poor if they would work harder, etc. …) To you, I advise reading The End of Poverty. It’s filled with economics and numbers and graphs… so it’s not an easy read. Neither is it a book that I completely agree with. But even if you aren’t convinced of his greatest claim (that extreme poverty could be ended in less than twenty years if the world tried hard enough), it makes a substantial and feasible case that it is very possible to severely damage extreme poverty on Earth and save millions of lives at the same time as stabilizing population growth through accountable foreign aid, infrastructure, and education.
And believe it or not, it wouldn’t have to inconvenience the rich world very much and just might make your country safer (after all, terrorism thrives in extremely poor and unstable nations).
3. Possibly, you just don’t care. I doubt you’re this person though, because if you were, I don’t think you would have read this far. If you are, though, I encourage you to read about the next group.
4. You’re in extreme poverty, and you wish someone would help you get out of it. Most likely you’re not reading this because your village doesn’t have a cell phone or internet, and you can’t read your own language let alone English. The land your family owns is so depleted that it produces hardly enough for you and your children to live on, let alone to take to market and sell it. You don’t have clean drinking water or any kind of sanitation, though a filtration system for your village would cost about as much as a popular video game system.
You don’t have a clinic in your village, so any illness at all could be a death sentence or enough to cripple you and destroy your only means of working your land to provide for your family. You only have enough money to send one of your five children to school. Even then, the chances of survival for that child are 50/50 and the money spent to send him to school might end up having been a waste. A drought could mean the difference between enough food to survive and the slow death of a third or more of your village.
I hope some members of groups 2 and 3 just switched to group 1.
Earlier, I said my thoughts had been about physical and spiritual poverty. When we, as Christians or as a human race, don’t attempt to help our neighborhood out of physical poverty, I’m convinced that we ourselves have slipped into spiritual poverty.
I don’t mean to sound so negative or to condemn anyone for their actions (or lack thereof). I’m bringing all this up to say this: Let’s fall in love with our neighbors. We can’t help everyone, but we can each learn to have compassion on someone, somewhere. We can give, we can raise awareness, we can act, and we can pray.
just another journey 