For the last couple of months we have been able to partner with several different groups of remarkable people who have worked at raising awareness for various needs. In Eureka, CA, we did an event w/ some people raising funds for child soldiers in Uganda.
In Bend, Oregon, and Lake Stevens, Washington, we did events to raise awareness and support for families in the area dealing w/ cancer. We have been humbled to be able to work alongside of such people and seeing them work gives me a sense of urgency in my own life to make these sort of things not just something I do but something that becomes a part of who I am.
There is a phrase written by the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah that has really impacted me lately. “He pled the cause of the afflicted and needy; then it was well. ‘Is not that what it means to know Me?’ declares the Lord.” The idea of knowing God is something that is very attractive to me, and finding out that somehow it is tied up in loving our neighbors (according to Jeremiah) kind of takes me off guard. But then I read that Jesus said similar things ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
Bono (a hero of mine) says “God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”
So what am I doing today to plead the cause of the afflicted and needy?