ON MAKING A DIFFERENCE…5/27/08
by SteveI heard something on the evening news the other night that’s been gnawing on me all week…every day and every night. There are 800 million chronically hungry people in our world. Listen to me…800 million people who go to bed hungry every night of their lives. 24,000 starve to death every single day. Every 7 seconds a child dies of starvation.
You’ve seen their pictures on television…on commercials for Christian Children’s Fund or Feed the Children. And many of you are probably like me…every time one of those commercials comes on, showing children with extended and swollen bellies, flies swarming around their heads, no life, no hope in their eyes…I turn my head or change the channel. I have thought to myself…the needs are so great…what can I do? And so I do nothing.
I remember a story about a little girl walking down a beach on which thousands of starfish had washed up for as far as you could see. She was picking up and throwing them back in, just as fast as she could go. An adult who was walking the beach saw what was going on, and said to her… “Honey, there are so many. What difference can you possibly make?” And the little girl, while tossing another one in, said, “It made a difference to that one!”
What kind of value can we put on saving the life of a single child, let alone the thousands we could save if we just decided to do it? Are we willing to be neighbors to those 800 million? It doesn’t happen automatically…it happens as we respond to the Spirit of God tugging at our hearts. And the best way I know of responding is by giving to the local church. I know it can be trusted.
RSS
I sometimes wonder if we took that mental image of the child we had seen, placed it in our heart and mind, remembered it daily in our prayer time and as we go about our day, if maybe we would be led as to what way to help this one, or another “starving” person in our world. Could we be so brave as to listen for such or just to even let that image be with us for a period of time? It certainly makes you view food in a different light.
An excellent suggestion which I will try to put into practice. Making this “personal” would go along way toward moving us to action!
This is such a challenging issue, as there aren’t really any answers. At the risk of being the devil’s advocate, first I’ll counter the starfish story.
A young man managed to get in to see Malcolm Forbes (at that time, one of the richest men in the world). Rather than have him thrown out or arrested for trespassing, Mr. Forbes sat quietly at his desk and listened to the young man go on about the unfairness of Mr. Forbes great wealth, the exploitation of people required to attain it, and how he was failing humanity by not sharing his fortunes. To the shock of the young man, Mr. Forbes then picked up his phone, called his chief accountant, and asked for an immediate assessment of his personal wealth. After some arithmetic on a pad at his desk, he then called for his secretary. When his secretary arrived, Mr. Forbes rose, prompting the startled young man to do likewise, and said, “This young man believes I can save the world by re-distributing my wealth, so I will start with him. Would you please see that he gets his $1.47, and show him to the door?”
In case someone missed the point, it’s this – even the wealthiest would bankrupt themselves trying to buy the world so much as one HappyMeal. Add to that the adage of ‘give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day, but teach a man to fish…’ and things start looking up, until you realize two additional points. 1) The majority of those starving people are starving for scarcity of food – ie.’lack of fish to catch’, and 2) Food is, ultimately, wealth. To address the first issue, take the story of the island and the cattle. A group sailed to a small, unpopulated island, to settle it. They brought with them a few cattle, carefully managing their herd, so the pasture wasn’t overworked. After several years, the people decided they didn’t like island life after all and abandoned the island, and the few cattle. Fast-forward forty years, and another group of people happen by this island, and are aghast to find it completely covered with scrawny, starving cattle. Without natural predators to keep the population in balance, the herd had increased beyond the capacity of the island to support it, resulting in starvation. For the second point, you have to look no further than Somalia to understand the totality of this – the militia’s there control the food, and fight each other for that control. This includes aid – relief workers, with a truck load of rice, do not argue with armed men! At best, the armed men decide who may get aid, starving into submission those who oppose them. At worst, a foreign army (like the U.S.) ends up sending troops to protect the aid workers, changing political dynamics, and people end up shot, instead of starving. Any way you look at it, it’s ugly, and there most certainly is a sense of futility and hopelessness in these realities. Now that I’ve painted a dark, despairing, and dismal picture of the human animal’s amazing ability to lay waste to itself, allow me to attempt to redeem myself by stating that we *must* help, where help can make a difference. If you need a self-centered, self-preservationist outlook, World War Two can be directly attributed to Germany’s hunger. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles left Germany bankrupt, it’s people starving. The rest of Europe was wholly unsympathetic, with Britain and France refusing to forgive the debt. It was this condition which allowed Adolph Hitler to rise to power. As the saying goes, “Fear most, he who has the least to lose.” Finally, coming back to the focus of this blog, we must help where/when we can because we claim to be Christian, and the vast majority of Jesus’ ministry was instruction to care for the less fortunate, it’s as simple as that. Yes, as long as there is human life, there will be human suffering and death. But to use this reality as an excuse to sit by and do nothing when you have the means to help, is to deny Christ. There’s no shortage of ways, not just monetary. As Steve points out, your local church is a fine place to start, and can certainly point you in the right direction. In the end, let us all hope our biggest worries are how and where we might help, and not how, where, or if we might find it.
Bj