Imagine 100 jetliners crashing today, killing 26,500 people. Now, imagine this happening again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen. But it did – and it does. It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that.
This little but impactful insert comes from Richard Sterns’ book A Hole in Our Gospel. Sterns is the president of World Vision and he wrote this book to stress the importance of serving the poor and those dealing with injustice. I could go on and on about this book and highlight several stories and points that Sterns make but I’ll only add two more that changed my life from reading this book. If you want to hear more stories I strongly advise you to pick up this book, even if it means spending money, and reading it. It’ll change your life…seriously.
Story one (found in the beginning of the book): When Sterns’ friend was attending seminary school he and some of his classmates preformed a little experiment. They decided to go through all 66 books of the Bible underlining every passage and verse that referred to poverty, wealth, justice, and oppression. Then they literally cut out every one of those passages and verses. They realized, through this experiment, that these themes of poverty, wealth, justice, and oppression are so central to the Scriptures. The group ended up with a Bible that barely held together. What they held in their hands was a Bible full of HOLES.
How often do we not pay attention to these verses or carefully read them but then don’t put our words into actions?
There are over 2,000 verses in the Bible that address reaching out to the poor and oppressed. But why do we just skim over these?!
A little after the top quote Sterns says: “So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access, and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they’re somebody else’s.”
We are given the awareness through the Gospel, and we have the access and ability (especially living in North America where we are filthy rich compared to the rest of the world) to put a stop to these numbers and bring the Light of the world to “the least of these”. Maybe Sterns is right. Maybe we don’t put these 2,000+ verses into action because these children are not our children.. We may not be related by our earthly blood, but these children are God’s children and are our brothers and sisters through Christ’s blood.
Story two: Half way through the book Sterns starts spitting out statistics about poverty and wealth that opens your eyes. One that hit me back when I read this book in high school, and even more now that I have lived in Ecuador, was the statistics about the thirsty. He says that it’s a lose-lose situation for those who live with unclean water. Parents either watch as their children die of thirst because they have no clean water, or die from diseases and/or diarrhea because they are given the dirty water to quench their thirst. Back to the top quote: 26,500 children die every day from preventable causes.
When I lived in Ecuador for a semester I experienced the dirty water first hand. We always had clean water in our apartment, but there was one night when we went to the theaters and I drank from the water fountain, thinking that the water would be clean….but that wasn’t the case :/ Then there were times that I would be traveling on buses to and from my internship where I would peer out the window and catch glimpses of children drinking water from a dirty pipe from the ground. It’s hard to grasp these statistics until you experience/see them first hand. Then it’s hard to forget.
I’d like to believe that my squad and I (along with all the other racers, past and present) are changing the statistics of the number of Christians who don’t pay attention to the thousands of commands that are in the Bible to reach out to the poor, needy, oppressed, widowed, and orphaned. Whenever you feel “too little” and discouraged by these statistics and the amount of people who are missing our calling as Christians, just remember “two thousand years ago, the world was changed forever by just twelve. It can happen again” (Sterns).
Peace in Christ,
Hannah
