The Hole in Our Gospel

This section of chapter nine of "The Hole in Our Gospel" by Richard Stearns (president of World Vision) describes very well why I continue to go back to Honduras year after year, and why I encourage other people to go.

"I have to confess to you that I, too, struggle to mourn over these kids as if they were my own. Becoming the president of World Vision didn’t turn me into Teresa of Calcutta. It is altogether possible for me to do my job at World Vision with a sense of emotional detachment. I can sit in meetings all day, review financial statements, attend chapel at eleven o’clock on Wednesdays, and even write a book about the poor, without my heart burning every moment with sadness., Like most Americans, I can get easily distracted by the details of my own life and family.”

“We have a nice home, live in a pleasant neighborhood, and go to a beautiful church. We make trips to the mall, go out to the movies, and take family vacations – often with little thought for the tragic lives of children thousands of miles away. But then I get on a plane, and twenty-four hours later I find myself in the home of a grieving mother dying of AIDS and leaving her five children orphans. Or I see a baby slowly starving to death, a child with one leg because of a landmine accident, or a little girl who was rescued from prostitution. And all of a sudden it becomes very personal again. Somebody else’s kids just became very important to me because now I know their names, I have looked into their eyes, and I have cried with their parents. I come back home angry at myself, incensed by my own apathy, with a fresh resolve and a renewed passion to crusade on behalf of these kids, to fight for them with every breath in my body. The meetings are no longer routine, and the balance sheets are no longer just numbers; they are now life-and-death issues. They’re urgent. We’ve got to do something! We’ve got to help! But then, a few weeks later, the fire dies down again, the images in my head fade, I drift back inside my safe and protected world, and they’re somebody else’s kids again – not mine."

"I mentioned earlier the prayer of World Vision’s founder, bob Pierce: “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” As I have tried to walk in some of his footsteps these past ten years, I have gained new insight into his prayer. While it was a prayer he hoped everyone would pray, it was even more personal for him. You see, I believe that even Bob Pierce struggled to sustain the level of brokenheartedness and caring required to press ahead year after year in this work of loving the poor. His prayer was a crying out to God, that God would break his heart yet again and again, because if He didn’t, Bob knew that he could not love somebody else’s kids the way God did. No man or woman can unless God breaks that individual’s heart. Only then can he or she – or we – care as God cares and love as He loves. That’s why we must pray constantly that God will soften our hearts so we see the world the way He sees it."

- The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, pg 109

March 7, 2010 | Filed Under Why Go? 

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