Baptist minister and social work professor Tony Campolo tells of a time he was on a supervisory visit to missions in Haiti where his undergraduate students did internships. One evening he left his hotel and went across the street to a small restaurant. He was placed at a table beside a large, first floor window that looked out on the street. It was a working dinner - he was eating alone. He kept his head down as he carefully checked over the mission files and travel plans he had laid out on the table. It was only when the waiter brought his food that he looked up and noticed the group of small boys outside his window. They had bare feet, sad eyes, and distended bellies. The boys leaned against the window, shading their eyes so they could see as they stared at his meal of chicken and rice with fruit. After placing the food in front of Tony, the waiter pulled down the shade and said, “Don’t let them disturb your dinner.”
The season of Lent is a good time for us to lift up our eyes and hearts from the day-to-day business of our lives to take a good look around at the world’s needs. Too often we are like the waiter, seeing the needs of others as a disturbance rather than as an opportunity to love and serve.
The needs of the world should disturb us, must disturb us. To stand by while children starve, others suffer from curable diseases, and still others are subjected to inhuman living conditions by corrupt and evil governments - this is participation in evil as surely as if we had directly made the decisions that condemned so many to so much suffering. “Things we have done or left undone,” the prayer of confession says. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 360)
Our call as Christians is to keep the shade up; to focus the light of God’s love and righteousness on the world’s great inequities and injustices. Our call as Christians is to find creative ways to make a difference, to do our part to chip away at issues of poverty, disease, and oppression; both across the ocean and across the street. We are not permitted the luxury of turning our heads and looking the other way. There used to be a little religious comic strip called Pontius’ Puddle. The characters were frogs and tadpoles and dragonflies and such. One day a frog said to a dragonfly, “Why doesn’t God do something about all the bad things in the world?” The dragonfly replied, “God Did! God made you, didn’t he?” Peace, Delmer