Ramblings from Readings

Yeah, I read a little bit deeper than Dr. Seuss from time to time. Over the weekend I finished reading "Blue Like Jazz". I really was challenged by it, and I would suggest everybody read it. It's not your conventional book on spiritual matters, an aspect that was intriguing to me. I would love to sit down and pick Donald Miller's brain sometime.

How many of you have seen the cover story for Time Magazine for the week of March 14?
The title is "How to End Poverty". If you can, read the article. Get ready for some gut wrenching stats and facts. The author of the article is Jeffery Sachs and he has a plan to cut the world's "extreme poverty" in half by the year 2015. By "extreme" he means people who are actually dying because of poverty. Right now 8 million people die a year because of poverty, and one BILLION more are at risk of dying. If my math is right, that means each day about 22,000 die because of being so poor they can't provide for themselves. A DAY! We're not talking about car wrecks or accidents or murders. Just poverty. One stat that really hit home to me because of my ties with Africa is that more than one million children die each year because of malaria. The number may be as high as 3 million. This is SO sad because malaria is a treatable sickness.....we have medicine to prevent someone from getting malaria, and then also medicine to cure you if you DO happen to contract it. So, at least 3000 precious children die PER DAY because they are too poor to afford the pills for malaria. That is equivalent to genocide for me. You may think that is too strong a statement, but I don't know how else to process it. Here is the kicker.....guess how much of our GNP (our govt. income) do you think we contribute for poverty per $100. Sit down.............FIFTEEN CENTS! I told my dad that on the phone and he said "surely you mean out of every dollar". And my reply was "no dad, out of every HUNDRED DOLLARS". Before you start into some political rant, or think that I am doing that, it's not just one party. It has been this way for YEARS......Republican or Democrat. The whole bunch of em are guilty. More importantly, you and I are guilty because WE ARE the government. Right? I know many of us help individually by contributing to non-government causes, and I think that is wonderful. I hope we continue to do that! But don't you think our government can do more, especially since supposedly they are representing our wishes? Have foreign governments misused our aid and wasted our funds we send? ABSOLUTELY. There ARE solutions to that mismanagement and waste. But cutting back or not giving like we are capable is not the solution.

I hope you will read the article, and I hope it motivates you like it did me to try and do something. What can we do? Well, we can contact our representatives and ask them for an explanation. We can vote for candidates who will address this problem with action. Lastly, and most importantly, I hope it motivates you to look at the person you see in the mirror and ask that person if he or she is doing all they can to help those who can't help themselves.

Remember what Jesus used as his criteria for who was going with him to Heaven, and who was not. It wasn't theology or the name on the building, it was who had been helping those who couldn't help themselves.

15 cents per $100 won't cut it. Will it?