Sleep on your stomach.
That’s one of the tricks of being able to go to bed hungry. It lessens the ache of not having enough food in your stomach. Something I’ve never had to worry about. The reason, I was born in America. The only thing separating me from others who suffer incredulous injustices and poverty is where I was born. And where I was born was not a choice that I decided myself. I do have the choice to feel entitled to the blessings God has given me. I’d rather share in the grace that I have plenty and others not enough.
Worse, every seven seconds a child under the age of 5 dies from causes related to hunger.
If you think these statistics are inflated, I just read another and instead of seven seconds they affirm it’s more like every three seconds a child dies from hunger based causes. That equates to around 30,000 kids everyday. The population of a whole city of children ceases because of a lack of adequate nourishment. I want to feel guilty about throwing away leftovers last night but I know that won’t make the situation any better.
When I talk with people about helping people around the world I get a common response, “Do you have to go around the world to help, stay here and help our own.” Granted there are many people in America that need help, I believe the underlying tone of this response runs not for needy Americans but the worldview of ethnocentrism. Here’s us, and over there is them. We’re over here and they are over there. We don’t know them and they aren’t coming to us.
Them and They.
There’s a divided line between these two camps. Nobody that we consider “them” can be part of “us”. Not until the line disappears. I go around the world because in my rule book there is no line. My life means no more than the next. The realization that we could have been born over here or over there without anything stopping God from choosing which side of the line to put us on should free us to help everyone.
To answer those that are still wondering why I’m going around the world… because there’s already more than enough people in America to take care of the needs here if they would just get off the couch and do something.
