As I was perusing the news feed on my Facebook profile the other day, I stumbled upon a note posted by one of my co-workers, Greg Birgy. (Greg is Compassion’s Director of Mobiliztion in the U.S.)
I was moved by what he wrote and thought it was worthy of reposting. So here it is,
in Greg’s own words:
I have friends in the Philippines right now. As I spent some time praying for them this morning, a strange conviction hit me.
Recently my wife and I were lamenting some of the shortcomings of our present home. We’ve been married for nine years and this is our fourth home (in our fourth state), but this is our first home without a basement.
We’ve never had elaborate basements, never a fully-finished one, typically just a cement area with storage, mechanicals like the furnace, and laundry. It’s the storge space we were really missing.
We like to think we live modestly, if not simply … yet we do have boxes and crates of “things” that we have to store … things like Christmas decorations, keepsakes, seasonal clothing that doesn’t fit into our closets, kids clothes that we pass from one child to the next, extra items that we don’t have space for in our kitchen cabinets, and so on.
What we do have is a crawl space under a portion of our home … a crawl space we were feeling was rather inconvenient and inadequate.
This morning, in my prayer for my friends in the Philippines, I was reminded of my own visit to that country last Fall.
While there I visited two different homes that required me to crawl to enter them … a first for me in all my years of visiting the poor.
Two homes in which I had to bow my head even while sitting so as not to scrape the ceiling (standing wasn’t even an option.)
Two homes that easily could have fit together inside the space of my “small” crawl space.
Two homes that collectively had fewer light bulbs than my one crawl space.
Two homes that had far fewer possessions than the “extras” I store in my crawl space.
My crawl space doesn’t flood when it rains. I’ve never seen a mouse in it, much less a rat like the one I saw while visiting one of the homes in the Philippines.
While I’m sure it is inhabited by an occasional spider, it isn’t infested with cockroaches like the tiny home in Manila.
The temperature in my crawl space is always moderate and vented with fresh air. In the homes in the Manila slum, the air was stagnant, humid and swelteringly hot.
I was humbled today, knowing that my crawl space is palatial compared to the homes I visited in Manila. My inconveniences are born out of my abundance … can they really be considered inconveniences?
How easy it is to lose perspective and take things for granted. I’m thinking my family wouldn’t last a day trying to “live” in our crawl space together, and I wonder how long we could go on living without even missing the things we have stored there?
Thank you for the lessons in humility and gratitude today Lord … may they permeate my choices, my lifestyle, in order to love you and your people better.
It’s so easy to lose perspective, isn’t it? Especially living in a country so full of abundance. Hopefully posts like this one can help us keep a true perspective on poverty, reality and our place in this world.
Do you have a story of how God used a small, seemingly insignificant moment to radically change your perspective? I’d love to hear it!