Today’s guest blogger is Suellen Wenz, an editor in our creative agency. Suellen checks the accuracy of the content that appears on compassion.com and this blog, and one day when she was really busy, we asked if we could turn a research paper she wrote for graduate school into a blog post.
We’ve tried to “de-academicize” it for you … you know, “friendly” it up a bit … but when talking about cognitive dissonance a certain amount of “What?” is still going to slip through. So, here goes.
The issue of the relative wealth of Western Christians contrasted with the desperate poverty among citizens of developing countries is compelling. As an editor at Compassion International, I regularly see individual stories of extreme poverty and its effects — stories repeated in the lives of millions of children around the world.
More than 26,000 children under age of 5 die every day, mostly from preventable causes; a staggering 980 million people live on less than $1 a day (UNICEF stats). These statistics are almost too vast to comprehend. So how do we, who live comfortably in wealthy America and other Western nations, confront the extreme poverty of our brothers and sisters in poor countries around the world?
What do we do when faced with this reality, especially as Christians who hold to Christ’s teaching about caring for the poor?
Should it and does it bother us at all?
Why do we have all that we have, and why don’t they have anything? Are we conflicted over this? (more…)
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