It Needs to Become Personal - The Hole in Our Gospel

If you read in a newspaper about hundreds of children dying of malnutrition in a famine in Africa, you might pause for a moment of genuine sadness - but wouldn't you finally turn the page, read the sports section, check the tv listings, and go about your daily routine? But imagine for a moment that you somehow discovered one of these starving African children dying on your front doorstep the very next morning as you left for church. Would you not stop everything, pick up the child, rush her to the emergency room, offering to pay whatever it might cost to save her life? You would almost certainly respond with urgency as one human being to another, and that far away famine you had read about the night before would very suddenly become intensely personal. You see, our problem is that the plight of the suffering children in a far-off land simply hasn't gotten personal for us. We may hear about them with sorrow, but we haven't really been able to look at them as if they were our own children. If we could, then we would surely grieve more deeply in our spirits. We would weep for their parents, and we would respond with far greater urgency.

- The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, page 108.