My life has just been rent, by Bono at a leadership conference.  His call to me — even us – is a tough one.  We live in a time of plenty.  Abundance is prevalent.  But it is concentrated.  Many times not maliciously, or with ill intent.  90% of the world lives without — without food, without health, without parents — without life. 

I have struggled many times with how to prick apathy of affluence.  I can strategize all day long on how to shake up the lull that most people live in, completely oblivious to the sheer calamity in most of the rest of the world.   8000 people die of AIDS PER DAY, yet we continue to worry how to better our own lives.  

So how do we prick the apathy?  It starts with me.  And yet, I don’t know where to start.  I am overwhelmed.  God will have to inspire me to my small part, I hope.  Starting today, I will be haunted by the abject hopelessness of millions of my neighbors (yes, they are my neighbors, even across the globe).  Starting today, pain and death will confront me until I DO SOMETHING.

Once I do someting, then and only then, can I start challenging others to get out of their element.  The only thing that will awaken us from the anesthesia of our affluence is a confrontation with the sheer horror of the exploited, the lost, the abandoned and the hungry across the world. 

It is once we see evil incarnate in the broken lives of the poor and disenfranchised that we can truly empathize with the spiritual need for Christ’s redemption within us all.  Then, we can truly be freed from the illusory comforts of our affluence. 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 6:31 am and is filed under AIDS, Bono, Challenge/Growth, Politics, Poverty, Social Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.