Passionate

No, not passionate as related to Valentines Day. I actually slept too late to kiss my husband good bye this morning. No, the passion was in our presentation last evening at the Lenten Service at our church, on the topics of Welcome the Stranger and Clothe the Naked.

We did a slide show (Power Point) on this topic, weaving in our pictures from our Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip to Uganda last November, as well as pictures from the God's Child project in Guatemala. Mercifully for the viewers, I left out pictures from Madagascar and Bolivia.

Apparently the presentation was well received, assuming stunned silence during the program even from teenagers is a good reception. Quite frankly, unless you can see it with your own eyes, the reality of intense poverty is impossible to understand. We tried to show, with the pictures, the everyday life of the people in poverty. "The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time,"said Willem de Kooning There is just no way around it: when you are that poor, you work all the time. Its like walking up hill on an endless sand dune without sandals.

My husband had some readings, from books and from his own essays. He could hardly get through them without choking up. He was out of his comfort zone, but he is passionate about this topic. He feels strongly that the economic inequities in the world currently are, ARE, sin on the part of the richer countries. He sees God's mandate throughout the Bible to care for people. He believes that God has used clothing as a metaphor for caring for people, citing Matthew 5:40, Matthew 6 25 - 31, Matthew 25: 34 - 36, Luke 3: 11, and an obscure verse, Amos 2: 6 - 7.

This begs two questions: 1) What do we do, NOW that we are informed? 2) Are we sinning when we are ignorant of these situations?

What do you think?