Sunday, May 27, 2007

Your grace is enough?

try and go along with me here...i wake up in my nice warm bed in my nice, cool, air-conditioned house. we get ready for church in all our "pretty" clothes, eat a good breakfast and drive to church in our nice car. we get to church, sing a couple songs...great music. then, they show this short video about an area of the world that a team from our church is going to this summer - Brazil. the people that they are going to minister to there live in a dump. THAT is their home. they live there, scouring it, trying to find something of value to sell. THAT is their life. we watch this video, then sing another song..."Your Grace is Enough." I stood there, as everyone else was singing that song...and couldn't open my mouth for the lump lodged in my throat. if i had opened my mouth, only sobs would have come out. i just don't understand. how are we here, in this "rich place"...and they are there? we don't deserve this...and they certainly don't deserve that. i know, it's a fallen world and there are injustices. i'm just having a really hard time figuring out how we're supposed to bridge that huge gap between us and them. yes, we can send money. yes, we can go down there for a week and help them have a water system. but that's not enough.

His grace IS enough.

2 comments:

Debbie said...

I felt the exact same way while watching the video...only my eyes did well up and I had to do everything I could to turn off the water works. It was heartbreaking...Lindsey's friend Abby asked that we donate money to a charity instead of a gift for her birthday (great idea!) So the money that we would have spent on Abby's gift and some of Lindsey's birthday money are going to be used by the two of them to pay the $65 to send one of the "dump" kids to the Bible camp RBC is sponsoring...That makes giving so real to them...and they are helping other children by sacrificing what they would have had for the kids who have nothing.

veronica said...

We talk about it in our house all the time. About how we have so much and that there are children in the world who have nothing. Every year we do a big lemonade stand and send our proceeds to a need charity. One year the kids raised $600 for Hurricane Katrina victims. It is our way of giving.