Sometimes I feel like I need to have all the answers. When
we see heart-wrenching things, I feel like I should know the right answer. I’m a leader. I did, after
all, travel the world and have my heart break over and over again for the least
of these-the poor, the dying, the orphaned and widowed. And yet I still don’t
have an answer. I still have no solution.
I know what I studied in school. The academic answers of
women empowerment, top down or bottom up economic development, microfinance,
the importance of education, etc.
But how do you tell a five year old digging through trash to
make a living for her family that she should stay in school? How do you tell a
woman selling herself on the street that she needs to find a microfinance
organization to fund starting a small business? How do you provide for a man
starving in a garbage dump? How do you say “I care for the least of these” and
let your heart break and then go home to a safe room and a warm meal?
Here’s the thing. I know you can. I know it is entirely
possible because I’ve done it for the last 2 years. Somehow I compartmentalize
enough to keep living my life, to process or push aside the images of hungry
eyes, begging hands, deformed legs, scaly skin, swollen feet, and go on living.
Somehow I push past to sleep at night, because I know
worrying won’t do any good. I know dwelling on the problems won’t actually
create solutions. I know we live in a broken, fallen world and a better day is
coming.
But until then, I wonder what the balance is. How many pairs
of TOMS Shoes do I have to buy to not feel guilty about having so many pairs of
flats? How many fair trade chocolate bars will make up for the kids who get
their arms cut off when they don’t pick enough cocoa plants? How many organic
products will make up for the fact that I drink bottled water on a regular
basis?
And then I know that’s not really it either. It’s not about
being a humanitarian or being altruistic. It’s not about figuring out some
magical cosmic balance sheet of consumption and production, of costs and
benefits, of money spent and money earned, and how it is spent and how it is
earned.
It’s about people. It’s about the one. It’s about finding
the least of these and befriending them, showing them the love of Christ. Once
again I must wrestle with what it means to have been blessed to be a blessing. Who
am I to have received all I have? If God loves all of us equally, why do I walk
in the favor and abundance I do and not my brothers and sisters all over the
world? Why?
Again…I still don’t have the answer. I feel very blessed,
but also broken. To have seen what I’ve seen the last two years and somehow still
walk away and be able to go eat McDonald’s or Starbucks. I just don’t know… but
maybe that’s okay. It’s not about the solution, but about the question. Not
about the whole world, but about one person.
I look to how Jesus lived and focused so often on the
one-the one sick girl, the one broken woman at the well, the one woman who
reached out to touch Jesus and He knew that it was THAT one. In the multitudes, to find the one and love
that one well. And you never know who that one may be. And I will probably
never know. And that’s okay.
