I woke up this morning around 4:30 in the AM, thinking about something I had written in 2004, about poverty. At the time I was fasting. I was fasting at first because I wanted to know if I had the willpower to do it, but then it became a spiritual experience where I was learning more about myself and my connection to the world around me than I had ever had up to that point. I was in the library at the local community college that I had been attending. I was trying to study, but some students were being distracting, so I decided to just write. I was writing about nothing in particular. But then I got this image of one of those malnourished children that they show on TV from oversees. I had this image of a child whose belly was swollen with hunger. I started to wonder what this kid did to deserve the life he had. I began to wonder why God would allow such things to happen. I have yet to find the answer. But I began to explore what it meant for me. I began to wonder what God was trying to show me through the image of a little child collapsed on the side of a road in a foreign country with a vulture waiting in the distance. Maybe, if we allow it, these images can teach us love. Not the act of love, but love itself. I can imagine there eyes not looking at me, but looking through me. Looking through the surface and exposing me. Exposing everything inside of me that does not echo love: the fear, the anxiety, the mistrust, the greed, the pride, all the things I keep hidden. And it shouldn't be a matter of "you can always find someone worse off than you." It should be a matter of shifting my misguided perception of how the world has wronged me. It should be a matter of living in a way parallel to what the New Testament teaches as opposed to what the Western Church teaches.

While I was trying to write this, I stumble upon a story....

Read it

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Amazing