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Challenge.01
Read the front page of today’s newspaper and pray for one of the many disasters going on in the international community. Start with these staggering statistics: There are 2.5 million displaced refugees in Darfur. 60,000+ people have died in China’s Chengdu quake. The estimated death toll in Myanmar has climbed to 100,000. More than 11 million children have been orphaned by AIDS in Africa. Do this challenge daily!

Response.01 - Edmund T.

70,000-plus people in Chengdu dead or still missing. Over 150,000 have suffered the same fate as a result of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. 2.5 million in Darfur has lost their homes. That's nothing compared to the 11 million children across that same continent left without their parents due to AIDS.

The numbers are staggering. It's as if the entire population of Union City was swallowed up by the earth, along with three-fourths of Fremont swept into the Bay. It's like every single person in San Jose and San Francisco forced to relocate and leave their homes because some two sides just couldn't stand the other. And imagine every single child in California as an orphan because a disease claimed their parents.

I'm trying to care.

Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not a heartless monster who finds a reason to hate everyone and everything that crosses my path. This soul is certainly capable of some pathos. I've gone on missions trips, served food at homeless shelters, visited the elderly, and passed food out to the hungry on the streets. I am certainly no stranger to helping out strangers; but why is it, on this particular occasion, so difficult for me to find a soft spot for these people?

The sheer enormity of the numbers somehow works against them. 70,000, 150K, 2.5 and 11 million...those are ridiculous sums there, but they are, on their own, just numbers. Even when applied to people, actual flesh and blood human beings, these numbers only gain a little bit of relevance as they evolve into statistics. It's hard to picture 70,000 people, let alone a group over one million. I've attended ballgames in packed stadiums, 40 to 50 thousand strong, but that's just a drop in the bucket compared to some of these numbers.

Numbers are powerful tools to help quantify the pain and suffering overseas, but it's a hollow power, without much meaning behind them. These numbers, as eye-popping as they are, have little bearing on my personal, day-to-day life. How many of the hundreds of thousands dead did I know personally? I see pictures of anguished refugees on news websites; I watch flies buzz hungrily around skin and bone orphans paraded about during commercial breaks on the tube, but they're half a world away. They're gone as soon I turn off the TV and shut down my laptop.

That's me, the Levite and the priest rolled into one.

And that's just it right there. There's just SO much pain, SO much suffering out there, that I've almost become desensitized to it. This is not the first time news of tragedies have crossed my path, and it certainly will not be the last.

I feel powerless to do anything about it. I don't have a Clark Kent disguise to cast away before I fly halfway across the globe to hold up collapsing buildings. I have no power to keep the earth from shaking. My last attempt to walk on water failed miserably; the wind and the waves would little but laugh snidely at my request for them to calm. I am not the premier of a Central African nation with the power to broker peace between tribes. I can't trick death to giving back even one dead parent to the orphans.

Even my prayers feel like they can do very little. How is the prayer of one believer going to affect the hundreds, the thousands, the millions of people who are the very personification of "pain and suffering"?

Can I change the world with a pittance of a prayer to an Almighty God? Maybe not, but it's not the prayer (both the request itself and the supplicant) that really matters. I can't save even one person, but I know someone who can. Praying for one miracle, that someone might still be found underneath the rubble of a fallen building, or that one child finds a home and family somewhere, seems like something that is remotely possible. There's a start.

God, grant me the faith to believe in mercy yet again.

Read Response.02

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