Let
me start with a couple family shout outs:…Happy Birthday to my wonderful
mother and congratulations to my sister who I found out today is having a baby
girl!!! Praise God for the celebration of life!
In Luke 10, we are told that we are to “love our neighbor
as ourselves”. One brave expert in the law spoke up and asked, “Okay, Jesus….so
WHO exactly is my neighbor?” It’s a worthy question and one that each of us
needs to answer for ourselves even today. Who are these people that we supposed
to reach out and show love to? Is it just the people next door or in our
church? I think many of us feel that we are only responsible to look out for
our close friends and family, but what about those on the other side of the
world that we may never see? One of the reasons I came on this World Race is
because of what I read in the book, “The Hole in Our Gospel” by Rich Stearns.
He says, “
“If you read in the newspaper about
hundreds of children dying of malnutrition in a famine in Africa, you might
pause for a moment of genuine sadness–but wouldn’t you finally turn the page,
read the sports section, check the TV listings, and go about your daily
routine? But imagine for a moment that you somehow discovered one of these
starving African children dying on your front doorstep the very next morning as
you left for church. Would you not stop everything, pick up the child, and rush
her to the emergency room, offering to pay whatever it might cost to save her
life? You would almost certainly respond with urgency as one human being to
another, and that faraway famine you had read about the night before would very
suddenly become intensely personal. You see, our problem is that the plight of
suffering children in a far-off land simply hasn’t gotten personal for
us. We may hear about them with sorrow, but we haven’t really been able to look
at them as if they were our own children. If we could, then we would surely
grieve more deeply in our spirits. We would weep for their parents, and we
would respond with far greater urgency.
How might God think about this issue? Does He
look at the suffering child in Cambodia with a certain sense of emotional
distance?”
Right before I left on my trip my sister gave me a
gift card for Kiva, http://www.kiva.org , a non-profit organization with a mission to
connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.
The money invested
from that gift card was loaned to a farmer in the Ta Phem village of Cambodia
named Mrs. Kim. Her and her husband wanted to start a new business breeding
pigs, but they didn’t have enough money to support this venture. With my gift
and others around the U.S. Mrs. Kim was able to buy piglets and pig food and is
already in the process of paying back her loan.
[Mrs. Kim with a group of villagers who all shared in the loan together]
Sitting in
the comfort of my living room in America, it’s true that Cambodia seems so far
away. “What do I have to do with some pig
farmer on the other side of the world?” Now I am actually right here where
she lives and the reality of poverty is right outside my door. As we drove through the countryside last week, I
looked at all the farmers alongside the road and thought, “I wonder if one of
these is Mrs. Kim?”
I learned
this week that 1/3 of the Cambodian population lives on less than $360 a year.
(And they actually use the dollar here for currency) We thought it was tough as
World Racers to live on a $1 per meal, I can’t imagine what its’ like to live
on a dollar a day for ALL your expenses!
It’s easy
to sit back and think, “What can I do
about poverty? The problem is so big, why even bother?” After traveling
around the world I have seen that a lot of times our attempts at helping can do
more harm than good. We are approached by beggars every day and there is no way
we could give to them all even if we wanted to. If we just handed them all
money we would be crippling them by not allowing them to rise out of poverty.
Giving microloans is a great practical way to help and provides shared responsibility.
I hope you will take the time to check it out and get involved in whichever way
God calls you to. And if you are looking for that perfect gift for someone,
maybe a KIVA gift card is the way to go…it’s the gift that keeps on giving! (Do I sound like a commercial, or what?) J
“Good will come to him who is generous and
lends freely, who conducts his affairs with justice. Surely he will never be
shaken; a righteous man will be remembered forever”. -Psalm 112:5,6
“He who gives to the poor will lack
nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses”.
-Proverbs 28:27
“If you spend yourselves on behalf of
the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in
the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday”.-Isaiah 58:10
