It has been two weeks since I’ve returned from Honduras, yet I’m still torn about how to articulate certain experiences. One person who is particularly hard to write about is Kevin McKenzie, the director of the Good Shepherd’s Children’s home where we worked.
Kevin and his wife Julie felt called to Honduras when they visited on a short-term mission trip and were obedient to God’s call. They sold their assets and moved to Costa Rica for a year of Spanish language school before Kevin started his position as the director of the home. Kevin and Julie have been at GSCH for almost three years now. They have tangibly changed the lives of scores of Honduran children, liberating them from brutal cases of abuse (some of whom were even prostituted as young children) and providing them with personal attention, education, safety, and most importantly, a Christian upbringing.
Kevin and Julie undoubtedly deserve the utmost praise and recognition, but we must be incredibly careful when we express that praise. I have found, in my own life, that I tend to offer gushing praise for certain individuals as a subconscious defense mechanism that excuses me from doing what they do. It’s as if I believe I am excused from helping the poor as long as I give the loudest and most noticeable standing ovation to those who do.
The problems of poverty and oppression in the world are ones that we are born into. It is not my fault that a ten-year-old Sudanese girl was gang-raped and murdered. It is not my fault that more than 300 million people around the world were living on less than $1 a day before I was even born! The recognition that most of the world’s problems are no direct fault of my own, however, is not a valid excuse to sit back idly.
Many people are born deaf, blind, or crippled, through absolutely no fault of their own. Can people facing these handicaps simply claim “not my fault!” and suddenly hear, see, and walk? Similarly, though I was born into a world full of problems, I have no right to simply claim “not my fault” and pass the problem by.
The one possible moral excuse I could have would be the excuse that the world’s troubles were brought about by the troubled people themselves. I know, however, that a) this simply isn’t the case for most of the world and b) this stance is particularly problematic as a Christian, because, even if it was these people’s own fault, we are called to help even our enemies (Romans 12:20 or Proverbs 25:21-22, for example).
My obvious recognition of such problems and my lack of action thus far have led me to painfully examine my life and to uncover several excuses I use on a daily basis to shirk my responsibility to the poor and oppressed. Many of these excuses even seem legitimate at first glance. Here is a run-through of a few of them:
1.) There will always be poverty. This is a very true statement. Jesus himself confirms it in Matthew 26:11. Nowhere else in the Bible will you ever see, however, the recognition that there will always be more problems used as justification for not trying to solve a fraction of any of them. We were given a tour of the GSCH school by Kevin one day and he mentioned that they have several children come from outside of the home to attend school as well. Most children, however, cannot attend school because the tuition of $15 US dollars a semester was too high. I waited for the catch, but there was none. It would seem, then, as if the lack of $15 donations would be a product of a lack of knowledge…which would make complete sense, because, until this Month, I didn’t know the problem existed either. I will match anyone up to $500 on this. If you’re interested, send me an e-mail through this blog!
Perhaps the best analogy I’ve heard describing this problem tells of an old man walking along a beach. It was the day after a huge storm, and the storm had washed up thousands of starfish on the shore. The starfish were piled two feet high and were dying every second because they were out of the water. Every ten steps the man picked up a starfish and threw it back into the ocean to save it. Another man saw this and ridiculed him, saying “can’t you see that what you’re doing doesn’t matter? There are thousands of starfish.” The man simply walked another ten feet, picked up a starfish from the knee-deep pile, threw it back into the ocean, and said “it mattered to that one.”
2.) I need to save my own money and time for my own purposes. I have often refused to spend some of my saved money now on humanitarian causes, and more importantly, on the advancement of the Gospel, because I have reasoned that I am saving it for later purposes like grad school, seminary, or purchasing a house. Why should I, however, be lucky enough to save for a house when others don’t have houses right now? Secondly, the Bible teaches against storing up money (one of the many ways the Bible is counter-cultural) in Exodus. God provides the Israelites with just enough food and resources each day (all of Exodus 16) for the specific purpose of increasing their dependence on Him and for them to glorify Him through the joy of recognizing God’s provision. When the israelites start storing up extra food, God is livid and rots the food. This process is, after all, one of the chief ends of man, according to the Bible. By storing up money, we only learn to depend on ourselves. Francis Chan so eloquently says, “who among us will step up and be bold enough to both pray and live in a way that will land us in deep trouble if God doesn’t come through.”
3.) “He/She has a big heart”. I have touched on this already, but time and time again, I have come dangerously close to speaking as if generosity and selflessness are purely genetic gifts. Though some people might certainly be naturally generous, generosity is something we should all take part in, rather than something to be dismissed as a genetic gift, as if to say “Jimmy is good at piano, Mary Anne is great at softball, and Brent is good at being generous.” Though I don’t literally believe this way, I often act as if I do. Please keep me accountable when I start to speak this way.
4.) Poverty and Oppression are Complex Issues. I often use the intellectual reasoning that poverty and oppression are complex issues (which they certainly are) as a way to excuse my inaction. These are certainly complex issues. Human sex trafficking, for example, cannot be solved by money alone because human sex trafficking has political, cultural, and ideological ties. What an issue like this needs even more than money is time; time spent in thought, time spent in prayer, and, as “radical” as this might be to say, time spent dedicating one’s life to this issue. Sometimes I wish people like Kevin McKenzie didn’t exist, because they are living examples of the fact that I have no excuse. Heck, I can’t even use the language barrier as an excuse. Kevin had a language barrier. He dealt with it by going to language school.
5.) Where is the stopping point? I recognize that everything certainly exists on a continuum and that there certainly must be some things I am allowed to enjoy. For example, I may sell every last item I own and give the profits to the poor, yet drink a Coca Cola the next day. Couldn’t somebody call me selfish for caring more about a soda then about donating the $1.50 I spent on it, despite the fact that I already sold all my other stuff? I guess so. Similarly, just as there exists an “enjoyment continuum”, there also exists an “effectiveness continuum.” I could sell this very laptop and give the $500 to the kids in Honduras, yet without my laptop I would likely be a far less effective missionary. The same is true with my car. My mistake, however (just like the point above), is that I let the knowledge of this continuum be used an excuse to not even figure out where I fall. I will be spending time trying to diagnose which pleasures I will allow and which I will sacrifice, as well as diagnosing where I fall on the effectiveness continuum. I can tell, however, by pure intuition, that I right now I can give more and hoard less. I don’t need to have fully figured out my official stopping point to realize that six pairs of shoes is excessive.
Please be in fervent prayer for me about these issues. Pray that God strips me of my addiction to material wealth and continues to soften my heart to situations of those around me. I hope that this blog was as profitable to you as the simple act of typing it out was to me. Lastly, I want to make it abundantly clear that I do not intend to be a stoic. When I read the Bible in an un-biased way, it certainly seems to be abundantly clear that giving and carrying out the will of God (no matter what suffering that may bring) are the causes of pure joy in life. The man in the Gospels who found the most precious treasure (Jesus) sold all he had and buried that treasure with joy. Conversely, King Solomon lamented his material wealth at the end of his life in the book of Ecclesiastes.
Please, if you read this and are willing, keep me accountable by e-mailing me through the link on this blog. Ask me whether my life is matching up with my blogs or whether I am still indulging in the excuses I listed above.
To God be the Glory!
