Great Needs

We live in a world with great needs and I am not amazed that it is too easy to overlook them - I lived for years in my own world that just tuned out what is reality. Here in Honduras we are able to recieve a couple of USA news channels and watching them is a constant reminder that living in the USA makes it easy to not know too much about the world we live in. If all we rely on is the news we see on TV, then it would seem that all that is important is involved with politics or with Paris Hilton. Every now and then, there is a 30 second blip on an earthquake somewhere in the world that killed 30,000 - but, real world is, you just don't see or learn much about happenings outside the borders.
This sort of world view limits perception to about 4 1/2 percent of the world population. It limits what we know or see about how God's creation is living. It also makes it easy to ignore the "GO" words that Jesus spoke when he was about to ascend into heaven - go into all the world! Ignoring the world means that our only focus is on about 1 out of 22 people on the planet. It makes it easy to forget hunger, the need for clean water, the pain of being alone, abuse by family or government, poverty, and especially the need for the hope that Jesus offers.
The little country where I live is full of poor, problems, top to bottom corruption, and needs. It is only 1,000 miles south of Houston, TX yet, a good portion of folks in the states would not have a clue where Honduras is - I was the same before I came here the first time. We are the same when it comes to the many many places in this world where the needs are the greatest. A big part of the reason is that we just don't understand what real needs are. Here, the need for food is great because more than 40% of the people will wake this morning with nothing to eat - absolutely nothing. We often help with food and with feeding children in places where there is no food in the house - yesterday, I had a team in the feeding center in Nueve Oriental and there, more than 250 kids ate lunch and it is very likely that more than half of them will not eat again until they have lunch there today. Today, we will go to feed about 300 people in the Tegucigalpa Dump and it is likely that most of them would have had nothing to eat today unless they found something edible in the dump or were in the line behind the truck where we are blessed to share a hot meal.
It would be pretty easy to look at the world and either become hardened to the needs or overwhelmed with all of the needs and maybe that is the reason that we ignore many of those needs. We certainly cannot change the world alone - but, we can make changes in the lives of one at a time and we can introduce hope to people - one at a time, and we can share Jesus with others by the way we live, share, and participate in their lives.
Open the eyes of my heart Lord, Open the eyes of my heart!