I have been deliberately stalling blogging about my current frame of mind lately. I’m really not sure how to put all the things running through my head into words that make sense.
Lately I have been overwhelmed on many levels. I’m overwhelmed by the dualism of seeing on the streets and in the provinces the poverty and neediness which has become a daily part of my life, and knowing that back home and throughout my life I have everything I’ve needed or wanted for that matter and more. What do you do with the poverty? I’m overwhelmed by the fact that I’m on this trip, meeting people and helping people as much as I can all around the world. Yet most the people I’m 
helping have never even left their city. What do you do with all the blessings? I’m overwhelmed by the stories of people who were in Cambodia during genocide, and people who fought for the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. What do you with all the suffering and heart break? I’m overwhelmed by the fact that i spend everyday, day in day out with the same group of people. They see me every single day. They know how I’m feeling. I couldn’t really get away if I tried. How do I handle people knowing me so well? I’m overwhelmed by the fact that I have spent my life pushing these questions to the side and justified them and rationalized them away. I will say I don’t support child labor, but won’t even stop to think about where the things that I buy are coming from and how companies treat the workers that make them. I will say that I care about poverty and go to the homeless shelter for a few weeks, but I usually end up filling that time with something else. Why am I so two faced?
And it’s clear enough, isn’t it, that we are all sinners, everyone of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else? Our involvement with God’s revelation doesn’t put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else’s sin. (Romans 3:23) MSG
And without God’s grace, there would be no way out. Even if I was a regular “ergonomic, only uses recycled paper and only one square at a time, low carbon footprint, kind hearted Joe nice guy, Ghandi-esque” type of person, I would still have to face my complicity in the world problems and have no answer for it. We all contribute to the heart ache, we all fall short, even when we are unaware of what we are doing. When I turn away from one problem there always seems to be another larger one waiting right behind me. It’s never ending.
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband.
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
(Psalms 51:1)
David spent most his life fighting for his people and finding favor with God. But he failed, just like everyone else. He killed a guy…I’m overwhelmed by God’s grace. I can’t do anything right. I can help a person one day, and the next day walk right past a beggar on the street without skipping a beat. I can buy a child a meal, and uncomfortably ignore the next widow that approaches me. It eats away at me. I can’t even count how many naked children I came across last month. I could cloth some of them, but not all. I could wake up one day and smile at the children on our street, but the next day glaze over them as if they ceased to look at me that morning. It happens all the time. It has been this way my whole life. Until now however, I have reverted to saying “thats just the way the world is” and leaving it there. It’s not my problem. I continue on forcing myself not to think about it. . I am nothing without grace. Nothing. David was a nice enough guy who only murdered some of the time. Without grace I’m a nice enough guy that still oppresses and ignores people some of the time.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God–through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
(Romans 7:21-25)
So I find myself broken, confused, and desperate to have an answer. I find myself wanting nothing more than to see justice, to see the hungry fed, to clothe the naked. I find myself wanting nothing more than to quit waiting for the world to change, and living to change the world. I was talking with another guy on the race the other day and he quoted Leo Tolstoy saying, “Everyone wants to change the world but no one wants to change themselves.” This is me… this is all to true of me. The longer I spend on this race the more I realize God is changing me in ways I never thought I would change. I have become the idealist I have always smirked at, and thought in my head that they are simply dreaming. I’m finding that me hoping that the world will change doesn’t do anything. Ghandi wrote “you have to be the change you want to see.” He wasn’t known for the people he couldn’t help, he was known for pouring out his life helping anybody and everybody he could. But he was just a dreamer.
