President Jimmy Carter declared that the most pivotal catastrophe of the millenium is the growing chasm between the rich and the poor world wide. When 1 in 2 people lives on less than $2 a day, it makes the privileged “world” we are familiar with actually pretty small, eh?
the more i live, the more I get lost in the numbers of this world. you ever feel that way? there’s a lot goin on with 6 billion people milling around all over the place. whenever i get a bright idea for myself, i get exhausted just imagining how i will stand out in a crowd that size (hey, we can’t all be Taylor Swifts, ya know?). But there is one direction that is failproof… when I direct my energy towards helping those that can’t help themselves.
whether you associate yourself with Jesus Christ and Christianity or not, the Bible is a fantastic read, but I’m gonna break it down for you: love God, love your neighbor, thats it. Jesus surrendered his immortality to live with us in our world and demonstrate just that- he encouraged us- GO and do likewise.
we have shining moments where love prospers (after tragedies primarily- but how ironic is that, it takes a something terrible to spur love?). One day a jet liner crashes… wait scratch that, if 100 jetliners crashed and 26,000 people were killed, we would all have quite a different perspective toward life and others that day. But we get back to our own daily grind pretty quickly. Well, what if I told you its a fact that 26,575 CHILDREN die every day from poverty related causes. WHAT- How are we allowing that to happen EVERY day? That we don’t treat this as an emergency-that’s our crisis, but we don’t, because they aren’t oUr kids.
but our biggest mistake towards each other must be that we are indifferent to one another. Don’t depersonalize the millions of faces of poverty.
“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 be like the noonday.” isaiah 58:9-10
we were born for this, its not the government’s job, its not the ‘called’s job, God asked us all, we should be the first responder to love.
the hole in the gospel by richard stearns is a read worth your time
