It’s been a long week already. I was trying to get some test product out to a customer by Monday, and thought I was in good shape Friday. Just to make sure, I ended up working from home for about 4 hours on Sunday evening. I came in at 8:30am on Monday, left at 11:30am to work from home (and watch the kids for my wife). At 6:30am Tuesday, I got up from my PC, took a shower, and came to work. Finally, I left work at 10:00am yesterday. It’s been a long time since I put in a 25 hour day. I hope it’s a long time before the next one.
My head is still fuzzy from lack of sleep over the past several days (lack of sleep started on Saturday), but here’s a few things that have been running through my head. No commentary (yet), but just some song lyrics that just keep coming back to me, and a passage from the book I’m reading (although I’ve had little time to read lately.)
From Brett Dennen’s “There Is So Much More”
I wonder how so many can be in so much pain,
while others don’t seem to feel a thing
Then I curse my whiteness
and I get so damn depressed
In a world of suffering,
why should I be so blessed?
From Derek Webb’s “This Too Shall Be Made Right”
I don’t know the suffering of people outside my front door
I join the oppressors of those who i choose to ignore
I’m trading comfort for human life
and that’s not just murder it’s suicide
this too shall be made right
I also downloaded Todd Agnew’s newest disc Better Questions last night. As with his previous work, I suspect there’ll be some of his lyrics making their home inside my head for a while as well.
And a few quotes from Ronald Sider’s book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Chapter 1):
The rich today can ignore famine because it manifests itself differently than in the past.
“In earlier historical periods, … whole nations … experienced widespread starvation and death. Today the advancement in both national and international distribution systems has concentrated the effects of food scarcity among the world’s poor, wherever they are.”
People with money can always buy food; famine affects only the poor. When food scarcity triples the price of grain imports … middle- and upper-income persons in developing countries continue to eat. But people already devoting 60 to 80 percent of their income to food simply eat less and die sooner. Death usually results from diseases that underfed bodies cannot resist.
Over two hundred million U.S. citizens were consuming enough food (partly because of high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poor countries. Oxford economist Donald Hay has pointed out that a mere 2 percent of the world’s grain harvest would be enough, if shared, to erase the problem of hunger and malnutrition around the world!
This is how famine has been redefined, or rather, redistributed! It no longer inconveniences the rich and powerful. It strikes only the poor and powerless. Since the poor usually die quietly in relative obscurity, the rich of all nations comfortably ignore this kind of famine. But famine - redefined and redistributed - is alive and well. Even in good times, millions and millions of persons go to bed hungry, and children’s brains vegetate and their bodies succumb prematurely to disease.
What will Christians do in this time of swelling affluence and persistent poverty? Will we dare to remember that the God we worship tells us that “whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord” (Proverbs 19:17)? Will Christians have the courage to seek justice for the poor, even if that means disapproval by affluent neighbors?
Where will you and I stand? With the starving or the overfed? With poor Lazarus or the rich man? Most of the rich countries are at least nominally Christian. What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, “Christian” minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation?
I hope to have time to post some thoughts on all of this in the near future…