Monday, 4 January 2010
Just do it
2010. Is that the year two thousand and ten or twenty ten? Does it make a difference? A new decade before us and still people all over the world will die of diseases that have a cure. Diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoea and measles still claim the lives of millions of people. Millions will die of starvation this year. Then to make matters worse, over one sixth of the world’s population have no access to safe, clean drinking water. Over 1.1 billion people will have to fetch contaminated dirty water which will give so many of them sickness of one sort or another. The list could go on and on.
A very good friend of mine gave me a present of a book this year called, “The Hole in Our Gospel” by Richard Stearns. It should be a must read for everyone. In the book the author asks a very simple question of all of us. What does God expect of us? Is our faith just about going to church, being nice to people, avoiding the most serious of sins and even reading the bible? Or does God expect more? Have we embraced the whole gospel or a gospel with a hole in it?
I have not finished the book yet but I have been challenged that as a Christian I must face the issues that I mentioned at the start of this article. We must face the issues of sickness, poverty, hunger and lack of clean water in a straight forward way. It is no longer a time when the church or us as individuals turn a blind eye and say, the problem is just too big, what can I do about it? We must answer the question, Who is my neighbour? Let this be a decade when indifference and intolerance are no longer acceptable terms and that we would show an expression of God’s love far beyond mere words.
I have sat in a mud hut in Uganda where a child is dying of malaria. What should I do or say? Then a feeling of hopelessness creeps over me. I ask myself the question, Who is my neighbour? I cannot make the excuse that because these people live thousands of miles away that I can just forget them. Or as I watch women, men and children fetch dirty, stinking water from a waterhole where the cattle have been drinking just a few minutes previously. What about the child who longs to go to school so he can make something of his life, but it is only something he has heard about from other people. I have heard the cries of a child dying of hunger. Do I have any compassion at all for them or their parents? To tell you the truth my heart aches. I must help, I have to help and I want this decade to be one where I can look back and see that I have lived a life of significance.
As 2010 begins each of us have personal responsibilities for making a difference in this world of ours. A good friend in Uganda once told me, it’s time for Western Pop singers to stop telling us to make poverty history. We know all about poverty. But what I am telling them is to make greed history and then there will be no more poverty. Let each of us pray that God at the beginning of this decade would take us to a new place of compassion and then to just go and do it. Let’s make a difference where a social changing revolution begins in each one of us and then reaches out to those who need to see God’s love in action.
Talk to you soon!
Trevor