Everything about this month is up close and personal: we live in a room that is generously 14×14, the smells sting the nostrils (see Anchorman), the kids hang on your every body part (more than any country I’ve ever been), and the poverty is tangible. You know how most of your life you go around thinking the few inches around your body is some known force-field that normal human beings/living spaces/(insert appropriate noun) don’t invade? Nah, that doesn’t apply here.
With what we’re seeing, living, and breathing, how can one go on living the same? What does one do in the face of such need? I know I’m thinking about just that in this picture as I look out from our room.
Go back to the US and start some sweet nonprofit? Perhaps.
Pretend places like this don’t exist? I sure hope not.
How about, serve where you can but learn as much as possible. I think my whole team is learning that while no human being needs to live in some of the conditions we see here (that does no one any good), we also need to strongly re-consider the standards we have for what is necessary to live. Extravagance is the word that comes to mind.
We are also learning that we alone are not adequate to solve the issues and realities we see on a daily basis. In the face of such need, how could we possibly feel adequate? We need to be teachable, humble enough to learn from each other—on the team, and in this community.
Thanks to Seth Barnes, I recently read this quote from Bishop David Zac Niringire of Uganda, whom I actually had the privilege of meeting last summer in Kampala:
“One of the greatest threats to the North American church is the deception of power—the deception of being at the center.”
More on dependency issues later, but I am thankful for a God that became poor so that we might become rich. And for my World Race family…
