Help for a World Without Starting Point

“We have no starting point, but vision we do have.”

~by a man named “Gift,” in Zambia.

Sitting down post-lunch to nibble on a large ripe banana I guiltily think that I’m already sated, having only earlier in the day been gripped emotionally by a mission DVD featuring “Gift” who despairingly and tearfully uttered these words above, frantic for an answer—the starvation of hundreds of orphans in the disease-ravaged African nation weighing stupendously on his heart.

It is a crazy existence here on earth, to consider that the country we’re born in so often directs our destiny in life, which is beyond the desire of the individual, many times, to escape their situation.

The Western ‘Complaint’

As I worked with the children who had watched the same DVD, many not touched, I had to quickly remind myself of their context. It seems too unreal. The dichotomies between Australian culture and Third World culture are too difficult to contemplate without visiting both.

The differences are too much for some. Either they rock back into their denial or they feel driven to make what difference they can. But far many more of us never seriously contemplate the vast chasm between the two realities.

The Western complaint is typically one that produces covetous greed and envy and we seem helpless to avoid it (without God). This complaint has generally no concept for the empty stomach and hopelessness on a foreign realm such as the above Zambian situation.

A Future Hope – for Opened Eyes and Ears to Listen

With all our advances into the technological era, the internet, social networking and globalisation, there’s one concept of world concern we appear no closer to settling.

This is how do we transport the human mind and heart into the deeper reaches of the crying, suffering world and get them to feel so more of a difference can be made?

How will we, in future years unto the next generation or two, use technology and an ever-decreasing size of the world (due to globalisation) to get the world’s populace to note and act upon the widening gap between the wealthy and the hopeless?

The poor of the world—those in their derelict nations—have good reason for vision; they must have it. They don’t have a choice. They must fight for survival, and how peculiar that is when we consider the good food we throw out as scraps every day.

Can we share their vision I wonder? It would be hard to see and feel as they do. But we must try. I also wonder if the so-called ‘revival’ that many avid Christians speak of might be better seen as a global objective that might, for the first time in history, put a serious dent in world poverty.

Now that’s a vision I can believe in.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.

Photograph Credit: http://www.weddingaces.com/2009/06/sharing-the-happiness/.