Borderless

...You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

-Colossians 3:9-11

First, thanks to the Wanderer for making me think. This is about the third time she's sent me into a good pondering session since I started reading her blog, which wasn't long ago. Second, I'd like to note that the results of my pondering are in no way a critique of her statement. It was of such brevity that I couldn't even grasp at what depth she intended when she wrote it. It was long and good enough to get me thinking.

When the tsunami hit southeast Asia in 2004, Americans reacted with their emotions and their pocket books. By the disaster's second anniversary, the U.S. federal government had given $841 million in aid, and U.S. private donors had given $1.8 BILLION, cash and in-kind. That's a LOT of money. By comparison, the American Red Cross has a budget of about $4.1 billion -- also a lot of money. Consider, Dear Reader, these statistics on U.S. poverty: The U.S. poverty rate in 2005 was 12.6%. Out of 300 million, that would be 36 million, mostly children. An estimated 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, including about 14,000 in the nation's capitol.

Admittedly, this pales in comparison to the problems facing the other two-thirds of the world, including the one-third who live on less than $2 a day, but c'mon, this is the richest country in the world and we can't do something about all our issues? I'm not out to be downer here, but I would suggest that the problem is not that we American's don't care enough about non-Americans. The problem is that a lot of us don't give a blessed flip about anybody, American, Sudanese, Venezuelan, or otherwise. Moreover, I see a willful ignorance of our own poor and forgotten. In my feeble observation, people react strongly to tragedy abroad because it's easy to sign a check and heave a sigh without actually getting involved. We ignore the woman on the bench who converses with herself because to acknowledge her existence so very close to us is the first step to admitting we are obligated to do something about her situation, and we are either unwilling or totally lost as to how to do that (and is there a difference?).

Please note, Dear Reader, I pass no judgment here. I look at material poverty around me and I'm at a loss as to how to do a thing about it. Spiritual poverty is more prevalent, and more destructive still, and I freeze at the sight of it.

But this is where God comes in. He doesn't simply fill our hearts with warm fuzzies, He expands them and leaves them just empty enough that we are driven out of ourselves and into the world to do something about it. We realize, slowly and sometimes painfully, that it's not about feeling good or being nice or being liked or an of the adjectives connected to "success". We realize that we are not disconnected from the starving child in Africa, or the woman enslaved. Our bond with the guy who doesn't appear to have worked or showered for a while becomes apparent. People of faith must admit God wasn't being poetic about that "love your neighbor" bit, even if your neighbor is a jerk.

And my point, at the end of all this drivel, is that the problem goes much deeper than national borders. The problem goes to our own instinct to self preservation, which becomes the drive for comfort, which puts up blinders to the plight of "the least of these". God calls every last one of us to our particular mission, be it foreign or domestic. The irony of Augustine's well-put truth that "Our hearts are restless until the rest in thee" is that once we really rest in Him, God kicks us right back out to work our tails off, wherever we are, to build up His kingdom.