But there are many who live without these things. They have no luxuries. They pray for their basic needs to be met. They likely live in extreme poverty. And I've probably seen their faces more than I can recall. Sure, we have all seen the kids on Save The Children ads with missing teeth and bones protruding out of their thin skin. We've passed the guy who lives under the freeway on-ramp who carries every worldy possession he owns in a grocery bag. We know them. They're "undesirable" because they look funny, smell bad, or maybe they don't speak our language. They're dirty. They're sad. They're pathetic. We know them. And we likely think, "they chose to live like that." We are wrong.
Rich Stearns wrote the following paragraph in his book, The Hole in Our Gospel:
What I have discovered in my travels to more than forty
countries with WorldVision is that almost all poverty is fundamentally the result of a lack of options. It is not that the poor are lazier, less
intelligent, or unwilling to make efforts to change their condition.
Rather, it is that they are trapped by circumstances beyond their power to change. Robert Chambers, a British researcher, has said somewhat
indelicately, "People so close to the edge cannot afford laziness or
stupidity. They have to work and work hard, whenever and however they can. Many of the lazy and stupid poor are dead." I have found that the poorer people are, the harder they work, usually. In fact, their
daily labor is more strenuous than most of us could tolerate. It is their
circumstances that conspire to prevent their hard work from bearing
fruit.
The truth is that at some point, I too have looked on the poor as "lazy". I probably felt that they are finally reaping what they have sown and paying consequences for poor decisions. And perhaps I've been right - but only a very small percentage of the time, at best. In Guatemala, a country near and dear to my heart, I saw some of the poorest of the world's poor. But I also saw some of the hardest working people in the world: men, women, children, elderly. No one was exempt. They worked hard all day. But their circumstances would never allow for that hard work to pay off. It was then that I realized my view of "poverty" was off. Poverty isn't a choice, but a circumstance.
Faced with the option to work hard and live well, or to be lazy and poor, I believe that the world's poor would work hard and be freed from the shackles of poverty - especially since they already work so hard. But the sad news is that they often don't have that choice. That's why so many illegal immigrants risk their lives for the chance to work hard and receive the reward due their efforts - fair pay for work.
Here in the US, our "poverty" issue is very different from countries like Mexico or Guatemala. Here, we have an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class. Many countries, especially those considered "third-world countries" like Guatemala, have rich and poor and little in between. If a US citizen finds himself homeless or hungry, we have shelters and soup kitchens, funded largely by the generosity of the middle and upper classes. We have resources available to meet our basic needs of food, shelter, water, hygeine, and medical care. But the poor in Guatemala outnumber the rich, and very few resources exist internally to give aid to even a small portion of the poor. Nearly all aid is foreign. And Guatemala is overrun with corruption, leaving little aid for the most needy. The rich will likely never leave their station, and the poor will never get rich. It seems almost hopeless. But God loves them anyway... and so should I.
So how do I do that? How do I love these "undesirables" the way God does? And will it matter? I mean, I can't save the world. I'm just one person.
"Don't fail to do something just because you can't do everything." I love this quote from Bob Pierce, the founder of WorldVision. But isn't that true of us, sometimes? The problem seems too big and too overwhelming. We fool ourselves into thinking there is just NO WAY we could ever fix the problem, so we do nothing. And while we sit around doing nothing, the problem gets bigger. But maybe WE are the problem, or at least our way of thinking is. Why would we ever believe that we could fix such big problems like HIV/AIDS, hunger, lack of clean water, and other injustices? On our own there is very little any one of us can do to solve these problems. But do we not believe in The One who can? With Jesus, ALL things are possible.
In Mark 6, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 teaches us about a God of miracles. 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish fed 5,000 men and an unknown number of women and children. In John, the story goes a little deeper: it was the lunch of a little boy that fed all the people. The disciples searched the crowd for food and found only "a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish." (John 6:9) On his own, that boy couldn't feed 5,000. Likely, he wouldn't have been able to feed even his own family with just 5 loaves and 2 fish. But when you put all you have in Jesus' hands, it's more than enough. Give Jesus your heart and all you have and let HIM do the miracles.
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke those words decades ago, but they still ring true today. We cannot sit back and do nothing. Not when there is injustice in this world. God's children are suffering, and we are called to take action. It is a far, far greater sin to do absolutely nothing than it is to take action and fail. All around us there is a world aching for someone to help. The need is everywhere. People are hungry, people are thirsty, people are naked, people are sick, people are enslaved. What will you do about it?
At the end of my life, I will stand before God and He will ask me two questions:
1) I sent my Son for you; what did you do with Him?
2) What did you do with the rest of my children?
How will I answer Him? How will you?
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