Justice

It’s important because I am their sister, I go to meetings with them, wear the same clothes as them, attend the same school and many of the same classes but I am still thought of as less and I can be in danger of my life because of my skin color.

How is it, that simply by being born into a certain country, I am free to practice my faith where as my brother and sisters in Christ do so at the risk of losing their life?

Matthew didn’t just sit there and pray a prayer to follow Jesus in his heart or a promise to think about following him; he actually got up and followed Jesus.

I was born and raised in the United States, but now live, work, and go to church in Ghana. I have come to believe that so much of the injustice, racism, and environmental and economic exploitation that plagues our world finds its root in a failure to be satisfied with “the food that I need,” as it says in Proverbs 30:7-9:

These past months, as I’ve lived in the story of Matthew’s Gospel, I’ve found a gospel written for a time like ours. I’ve found a manual for the disciples of Jesus living in a hurting world.

For the last 4 ½ years Syria has been embroiled in a civil war, the net impact of which is that many Syrians are fleeing their homes, either to another part of Syria or to another country. This is “perhaps the greatest human suffering in our world today.”

God has been wooing Emily Sippel. At first, it was through a high school science teacher who helped her fall in love with biology and consider becoming a doctor.

We are in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Over 9 million Syrians have had to leave their homes in the past four years. Of these, 3 million have had to flee their country. A million of these are now refugees in Lebanon, a country whose total population is only 4.4 million. In other words, one out of every four souls in Lebanon is a refugee from Syria. And besides Syrian refugees, Lebanon also hosts Iraqi and Palestinian refugees.

I remember praying all night for women that I have never met, not just in Tampa but in this world to know how loved they are by Jesus. I prayed that someone, somewhere could do something to help the women of this world who are exploited every day. I haven’t stopped this prayer. I prayed that there would be more people like I had met to serve God’s people in other corners of the world. But then this idea came to me, what if I could do that? What if I could serve God’s people? What if this is my call?

The problem with those of us who have the social privilege, the finances and the mobility to travel is that we like to impose blessings upon others. We too often rush to give people we don’t really know what we think they need from our insular, ethnocentric perspective.