26,500
"Whenever a major jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, it inevitably sets off a worldwide media frenzy covering every aspect of the tragedy. I want you to imagine for a moment that you woke up this morning to the following headline:
100 jetlines crash, killing 26,500.
Think about the avalanche of media coverage that this would ignite. Air travel would no doubt grind to a halt. Law enforcment, FBI, CIA, the government, and whoever would dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.
Now imagine the very next day 100 more planes crashed- and 100 more the next and the next and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.
But it did- and it does.
It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No one stopped what they were doing to address the crisis, and no investigations were launched. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of a year. Children with dreams and families, personalities and desires. All dead.
So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of 100 planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access, and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these children who are dying are not our children, they are somebody else's.
How might God think about this issue? Does He look at the suffering of a child in Malawi or Haiti or India with a certain sense of emotional distance? Does God have different levels of compassion for children based on their geographic location, their nationality, their race, or their parents income level? Does He forget about the pain because He is preoccupied with other things? Does He turn the offending page to read the sports section---
or
is His heart broken because each child is precious to Him? God surely grieves and weeps because everyone of these children is His child- not somebody else's.
He wants it to be as personal to us as it always is for Him.
Children are not statistics to God."
- The Hole In Our Gospel
Richard Stearns
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in the land.
- Deuteronomy 15:11
100 jetlines crash, killing 26,500.
Think about the avalanche of media coverage that this would ignite. Air travel would no doubt grind to a halt. Law enforcment, FBI, CIA, the government, and whoever would dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.
Now imagine the very next day 100 more planes crashed- and 100 more the next and the next and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.
But it did- and it does.
It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No one stopped what they were doing to address the crisis, and no investigations were launched. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of a year. Children with dreams and families, personalities and desires. All dead.
So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of 100 planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access, and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these children who are dying are not our children, they are somebody else's.
How might God think about this issue? Does He look at the suffering of a child in Malawi or Haiti or India with a certain sense of emotional distance? Does God have different levels of compassion for children based on their geographic location, their nationality, their race, or their parents income level? Does He forget about the pain because He is preoccupied with other things? Does He turn the offending page to read the sports section---
or
is His heart broken because each child is precious to Him? God surely grieves and weeps because everyone of these children is His child- not somebody else's.
He wants it to be as personal to us as it always is for Him.
Children are not statistics to God."
- The Hole In Our Gospel
Richard Stearns
There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in the land.
- Deuteronomy 15:11
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