I’m home from Ethiopia, where as predicted, connectivity wasn’t the easiest. My traveling companions —Max Lucado, Mike Hyatt (CEO of my publisher, Thomas Nelson), and others on the trip did manage to regularly Twitter, however. Find their tweets at Twitter.com under the #wve hashtag. By everyone’s account, it was a great trip. We all thank you so much for your prayers!
Every trip like this—to meet those living in dire poverty—leaves me changed. I feel a combination of being outside my comfort zone and yet exactly placed in God’s will. I’m fired up to help families in Ethiopia and elsewhere to reach their full potential. I know their names. I see their faces. It’s personal.
But now I’ll get back into my daily life, and Ethiopia’s vibrant memories likely will fade. As I wrote in chapter 9 (page 109) of my book: “I drift back inside my safe and protected world.” I know my traveling companions will struggle with this as well. Mike wrote in a Twitter post during his return home: “I pray that I won’t be sucked back into the status quo.”
When God blesses us with significant—even life-changing-experiences, it’s a challenge to keep the flame of urgency burning over time. How do we build on these experiences to accomplish great things for God?
Max Lucado and Mike Hyatt are well positioned to influence millions of people. My prayer for them, and for the whole team, is that we retain the urgency of those convicting moments in Ethiopia, when the needs were so clear and our hopes so high. As I wrote in chapter 9, may we continue to see every suffering child as our child.
After some sleep and processing, I’ll share more from Ethiopia. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. After coming face-to-face with people in poverty and need —anywhere in the world, even in your own city —how did it change you, and how do you sustain your passion?
I just came back from Ethiopia after living there for four months. I went with a medical team and stayed after they left. My greatest fear was falling back into the status quo when I was on my way back to the states. So, I committed before I left to do something about what I encountered, and to get others involved as well. So, I put together a website (http://www.pleaseread.org/) and am working on youth centers and soccer clubs. Especially with the 39 million youth and the median age of 16.
Considering my inspiration came from a boy in my village who lost hope for life and took his own life, I sustain the passion to do this by living as though my life depended on it.
For me there is nothing else. I am convinced of it, and the vision won’t happen if it’s not inextricably related to my own life. This came from a realization that the decisions I make affect someone, somewhere in the world, and knowing this I can’t do nothing. Knowing this I keep the vision always in front of me, even if that means logging off or tuning out from most everything else. It’s inextricably connected to my life. That’s it. For me to do nothing would be the same as the boy who took his life in my village.
I have an adopted son from Ethiopia, so I am all too familiar with the poverty there. Thank you for visiting his birth country. I have been to Africa 3 times and every time I come back I experience exactly what you describe. It is so easy in our culture to do.
I look forward to reading your book (and Mr. Lucado’s!)May God forgive the church in America for it’s complacency and cause us to rise up and bring good news to the poor!
Thank you for sharing your stories and for your compassionate heart for children in need. Like you, I’m thankful that I can’t forget the poverty I’ve seen, nor can I be complacent about it! Mike, I very much appreciate your request to speak at your event, but regret that I won’t be able to join you due to other scheduling demands. However, if you’d be interested in another speaker, you may wish to visit www. worldvision.org/speakers for possibilities.
I have been reading this book and can honestly say I have never underlined so much in one piece of literature. It has been a convicting book for me.
God is using this book and other circumstances in my life right now to evaluate what I is the next step I need to take.
Thank you so much for writing this book. It is a blessing and a wake up call to all Christians out there. We can not sit in our comfortable houses and attend our comfortable churches and ignore a world that needs to hear about Jesus and the world change he wants to bring.
Mr. Stearns, reading your story and hearing of your passion is one way we all keep the fire burning, God uses the strengths within us all to shine His light to others.
Personally I started addressing people in need 26 years ago when I became a firefighter in a small city of 70,000, just east of Seattle. I had no idea so many people needed help daily, heart attacks, construction accidents, drownings, motor vehicle and pedestrian accidents, not to mention fires. It was overwhelming at times.
But, the satisfaction and personal growth we all receive from putting others before ourselves comes from God and cannot be replicated in any other way.
I was fortunate enough to serve on a missions trip in Mexico in the late 90′s. I went to Katrina and served there for my fire dept. I have also participated in devestating wildland fires and been called to various other large scale emergencies. This is all to say that the single most devestating experience God has ever put me through was my first trip to Sierra Leone, Africa. We were going to put on a medical clinic in Makeni. When our plane landed it was dark, no electricity, only the familiar noise of instability. That night I was preparing myself for a giant 911 call. When I awoke and saw the city in the light of day I knew I had to radio for a second, third and fourth alarm. As soon as the radio traffic from that request cleared I would then ask for a task force response from Seattle. Once I realized that was not possible I did what we all do when we are overwhelmed….I asked God for His help. This was His plan, and all I needed to do was have faith in his ability to work us through this.
As for keeping my fire lit…..Going to Africa was the single most impactful experience God could have put me through to ignite and sustain my passion. The first few days there I was mad at the World for letting people live in such a pathetic state. Then that anger and disappointment was turned toward myself. It must have been God who refocused my anger because I know I have never been that hard on myself:) By the time we left I knew this would be a lifetime experience.
My wife and I have been working in Makeni for 4 years now and have started a non profit 501 c3 called The Bridge. We have started 4 Church/schools and are working on a Health and Hygeine Center. We have a larger vision and many friends and partners in Sierra Leone including President Koroma.
I have also rediscovered, after 26 years, the overwhelming feelings God gives us when we participate in something bigger than ourselves and use the gifts He gave us for His plan.
Blessings, Mike
(Also, we are having an informational and awareness raising meeting in Maple Valley on Thursday, June 4th. Our guests will include various elected officials and buisiness leaders. We would love for you to come and give a short testimonial on your work. Your presence would be very beneficial in helping us deliver our message and explain the urgency. We are also inviting Mayor Bill Baarsma. Thank You for your consideration and you have my e-mail.)
Through my Christian college, I volunteered for a summer of mission work overseas in remote Pacific Islands in the early 90′s. We travelled to primitive islands and did health talks and ran little Vacation Bible Schools for kids. At the end of the summer I wound up very ill in a third world hospital. I came home with amoebas, but I got treated. Death by amoebic dysentery is NOT the way to go, by the way, if you have a choice! But I have never forgotten that this is how most of the world’s people live. I drank bad water and became very ill — little children or frail people drink water like that and die. I slept in mud thatch huts for a summer — many people live in huts like that for a lifetime. My little hospital room had no running water for 3 days — but I was lucky to have even that when many of the world’s poor have access to no hospital at all. I lost 20 pounds in one summer — but over 26,500 children a day die of starvation or poverty related illnesses. I had a small taste of life in illness and poverty, and have never forgotten it. I keep three sponsored children through World Vision and try to donate regularly through our own church’s mission program also. I am so much more grateful for what I have. But I also feel deeply reponsible for what we have been given. When I first came back, I wanted to sell all that we have and live in a hut, but I was talked out of it because of the long Michigan winters.
I loved your book, “The Hole in the Gospel,” and I read it all in one day. I was stunned to see the survey that said people in the US wouldn’t want to sponsor children whose parents had given them AIDS or left them orphaned because of AIDS. I have a little World Vision Hope child who I love like my own niece. When I donated an extra $100 for her a few months back, I got a picture of her little shopping choices, that touched me and broke my heart, such simple little useful things, not one toy, but she looked ready to cry even as she smiled. I wish I could hug her and I wouldn’t care if she has AIDS or not. She wants to be a nurse and I will do what I can to help her. But even if someone became ill because of their own choices, let alone an innocent child, wouldn’t we want to love them and care for them?
I can’t ever forget the things I saw overseas. I have not processed it well. I don’t think we are meant to, we are always meant to be uncomfortable when we see suffering. I work in a hospital myself, and I am never comfortable with seeing people hurting or dying.
Your book touched on so many topics that just overwhelmed me, especially the thoughts on money. I can’t help all children, but I can help some.
My all-time favorite story about money is the story of the rich man who dies and goes to heaven. He puts all of his wealth into gold bars in a wheelbarrow to try to take with him. At the gate, St. Peter stops him. “I’d really like to take my gold with me into heaven,” the man explains hopefully. St. Peter looks over his cart, nods, and waves him in — “Sure, you can bring that with you, we can always use more asphalt!”
We can’t take our money with us into heaven — why not use it here, where it can help so much? Some day, I mean to ask Jesus why I was born in America, instead of born as a little vulnerable child in a place of famine. I wonder what He’ll say. And how I’ll answer Him. He loves me — but He also loves these little ones.