Privilege, Peripheral People, and Rising Lights

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As I write this, I am sitting in my comfortable East Tennessee home. My reality is safe, secure, well-fed. But when I travel to Brazil, I encounter a far different kind of reality.

  • Poverty beyond my comprehension.
  • Kids who know a life I can never understand.
  • Twelve-year-old boys with death warrants against them from drug lords.
  • Girls taught since early, early childhood that their only value in life is in the depraved pleasure they can bring others.

A very different reality… Yet somehow I am supposed to believe that God loves them as much as he loves me.

Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all.

In fact, if I look to Scripture, God’s heart is absolutely broken for them. A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.

I still do not understand—and never will this side of eternity—why children God loves have to hurt in the world He created. But I do know this:

As long as the peripheral people of this world are hurting, we are called to be the hands of God’s love for them.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
 with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry 
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness,
 and your night will become like the noonday.

 

Light rising in the darkness.

My light. Your light.

Rising together in the midst of a very dark world.

I feel hopeful just writing those words…

 

What would that look like to you? What will you do today to spend yourself in behalf of peripheral people?

Won’t you leave a comment and share your thoughts? Let’s encourage each other!

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