A few years ago, I worked for an NGO, helping them launch a new humanitarian relief program. During those years, I saw enough poverty and broken humanity to wreck my life. Many nights I would lie awake with the images of those children before me. Global poverty is overwhelming. When you stand in the middle of it, see it, smell it, touch it, your life will be forever ruined for the ordinary. So many times I felt powerless to make a significant change. In those times, it helped to rant and rave on paper. The following article was written on one of those nights...
Did you hear? 27,000 children died yesterday. Oh, wait. You probably didn't hear that one on the evening news. That's too bad because 27,000 children died again today. And guess what will happen tomorrow? You guessed it. Another 27,000 kids will die. I lay awake for a few hours sometime in the middle of the night which was quite frustrating, to be honest, because in one week's time, sleep will be a limited resource. I was thinking about these kids and how it's like losing a small city every day. If it happened in North America, wouldn't it be on the news? Wouldn't we do something about it? Wouldn't our governments throw billions of dollars at the problem if it affected them personally? You know what is even more heartbreaking? They aren't dying from some strange incurable disease. They are dying because they don't have clean water, food, education or an immunization program.
Last year during one of our trips, one of the participants offered a candy to one of the little kids. His response was, "No thank you. It's not my turn to eat." This little guy lived with his mom and two other siblings. He ate once every three days. Today was his little sister's turn to eat.
Guess how much Canada spent on retail sales December 2005? $36.8 billion. We also spent another $393 million dollars on Christmas decorations. I think of Esperanza, my little Compassion Child. $420 supports her for one year. If you do the math, just over $4 billion dollars would have kept those 9.85 million children alive last year. I feel sick. Poverty isn't something new. It's always been there since the beginning of time. However, now we have no excuse because we can Google the stats on the internet. Do you think that we, as a country, might be held accountable someday?
In this current season of my life, I am not able to physically be in the middle of this poverty I write about. Every part of me wants to be back there and it frustrates me on many days. I never want to forget how the rest of the world lives. The widows, the orphans, the children sold in slavery, the two little girls in the white convertible in Sosua who were being pimped out one night, the prostitutes who are ashamed of their work but find it's the only way they know to feed their children, and on and on and on it goes...
I'm just not satisfied with a normal, comfortable life, living only for my own pleasure. I live in Canada but I left a part of my heart on a dirt road in the middle of somewhere. God, please don't let my dreams die. Instead, in this wilderness season, refine them into what you've called me to be.
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