To all of you who responded with your encouragement, comments, and ideas, thank you. I cannot begin to tell you just how much I appreciated hearing from all of you. The time and thought you took to read and respond truly blessed me.

Another week has begun and my feeling of being overwhelmed has yet to subside. The good news is this: it is something else that keeps it afloat.

In my first week, I felt that the seemingly endless amount of information and research would overcome any ability I had to unscramble and make sense of it all. But, through much prayer and divine intervention, excitement and inspirations are beginning to summit; brainwaves are coming in with tides of insight.

If you have not noticed already, our society and culture are on the brink of monumental changes as a historically influential and significant generation (the Baby Boomers) are headed towards retirement. It is also no surprise that my generation, Gen Y, having grown up in such a technologically advanced society, are much more globally minded and aware than our parents were at our age. With the help of the internet, orbiting satellites, global political unrest and other end-time achievements, we are fully conscious and concerned about the part we play.

All that to say this: (more…)

“The opposite of poverty is enough.”

Have you heard us say this before?

Answer first, before reading on. (more…)

In an effort to keep you from becoming emotionally disconnected …

This video, featured on Washingtonpost.com, is the most effective video I have seen yet on the global food crisis, in terms of showing the awful reality of poverty.

As I learn more about this crisis, I am increasingly convinced that THIS – the global food crisis – is our opportunity to live out Proverbs 3:27-28.

Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act. Do not say to your neighbor, “Come back later; I’ll give it tomorrow” — when you now have it with you. (NIV)

Although Compassion does not currently work in Mauritania, we do work in 24 other countries where you can make a difference.

What will you do?

Have you ever repeated a word over and over in your head so many times that it eventually loses its meaning and starts to sound like nonsense? It happened to me the other day with the word “lemon.”

I said lemon so many times that it started to sound like a word I made up. Or like a word from a foreign language. After a while, the word “lemon” was meaningless — it no longer represented a tangy, yellow fruit. It was just a funny sounding nonsense word running through my head.

I think Satan likes to use a similar technique to get us to stop caring about the hurting people of the world.

Whenever we make an emotional connection to someone in need, we are motivated to act. So by getting us to feel disconnected from a certain group of hurting people, he gets us to stop acting on behalf of those who need help. One of the ways he does this is through what’s been called “compassion burnout” or “compassion fatigue.”

When a major crisis happens, the news media often reports it so quickly and intensely that for a time, it’s pretty much impossible to get away from it.

Remember watching TV the week after September 11, 2001? No matter where I looked, I couldn’t escape the horrific images. Those first few days, I couldn’t watch the news without crying. But after a while, I had heard the same stories reported so many times that they no longer affected me the way they did at first. I got used to the horror. I got numb.

Were any of you in this same boat with me? Maybe for you it was the coverage from Hurricane Katrina. Or the Asian tsumani. Or the earthquake in China. Or the Global Food Crisis. The list seems endless, doesn’t it?

This article, recently posted on urbana.org, addesses the idea of compassion burnout.

What do you do when you’ve heard something so many times that you get fatigued … you’re tired of helping, tired of giving, tired of caring?

How do you keep from getting overwhelmed with the desperate needs of the poor or numb to their pleas for help? How do you not get discouraged by the never-ending necessity for compassion?

The article includes several good suggestions for preventing burnout.

But what I’d love to know is how you deal with this on a personal level. Are there things we can do in bringing the needs of the poor to your attention that will help create the emotional connection and keep our stories from getting stale?

In response to the global food crisis, Compassion International has begun interventions for the countries we serve.

Last week we received this photo from Haiti, where they have begun distributing food kits for temporary relief to the families who have been hardest hit. These parents are waiting in line to receive their food kit vouchers from the Compassion Haiti staff.

Seeing this photo affected me. Looking at the parents, I was struck by how they look so, forgive me, normal. I know how wretchedly condescending that sounds. No matter how much we intellectually agree that the people in poverty are no different from us, there’s still this little piece of our psyches that can have an us/them mindset.

The problem with this is the disconnect that happens. When we think of “the poor,” we get this hazy picture in our mind of children with bloated bellies and flies in their eyes. And although this picture in our minds is thoroughly pitiable, it’s utterly unrelatable. We don’t think of them as we would our aunts or neighbors or nephews. We think of them as people we feel bad for, even very bad for, but can’t really understand or relate to. We disconnect. An iron wall slams down in our minds separating us from them.

And so it can become easy to glaze our eyes over, move on, and forget. We don’t connect with those individuals suffering as our fellow humans, but as a big crowd of foreigners somewhere else unknown and unseen.

Look at that woman in the yellow dress. Look at the dignity in her face. Look at that man in the blue shirt. His eyes seem to look right through me. I don’t think any amount of intellectual striving will get me to the point where I view the people suffering around the world as I ought. But rather, we need God’s Holy Spirit to transform our hearts and minds, to help us to view each individual the way He views them.

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless.” —Matthew 9:36, NIV