Every now and then I get a glimpse of it. Fleeting at best, it hints at a reality strong enough to erode most of the world I live in. I know God loves me, and I believe He cares about the simple things in my life, at least in part. But there are moments, moments where my perspective threatens to shift and reveal how inverted and disconnected I really am.
Like most Christians I pray about the simple things in my life: finances, direction, health, purpose, etc. I pray about them because I care about them, they threaten my emotions and grab my attention. The shudders pass through my system when, in the midst of my self-absorption and prayer, I look out and see someone with nothing. Seeing a grown man, wearing rags, hauling buckets of water to his mud hut, cooking roots on an open fire, and living off pennies a day makes me wonder how much God could actually care about my issues. Not that He doesn’t care about me, but what gives me the right to pray about the nuances of my life when others around me are locked in survival mode.
Bill Gates praying about business issues while infants wither from malnutrition seems like an absurd scenario. Yet on a smaller scale we practice the same action almost every time we open our mouths in prayer. I’m not sure our praying about our mostly irrelevant issues, while others suffer abuse, bothers God too much. Like a father, I think He’s happy to be included in every aspect of his children’s lives, even the silly ones. What likely does bother Him is our becoming so involved in our own petty issues we fail to care or become involved in the real issues of those around us. I think He hates the spiritual introversion that allows us to call for our father to look at our boo-boo when He is asking us to help triage in a war zone.
For some inhuman reason (I mean this in a good way) He does care about our boo-boos, the question is, do we care about the ones on the stretchers?
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