Statistics.

"The place God calls us to is the place where

your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." 

- Frederick Beuchner 

My friend Saji Lukos recently told me that his ministry in India, named RIMI (check out RIMI.org), is working to train up 5,000 young Indian men and women each year to be leaders and ambassadors for Christ. 

Dr. Paul Kooistra, former president at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis and current coordinator of the ministry Mission to the World, recently told me that while Christians oftentimes feel outnumbered and overwhelmed in a seemingly atheistic world, one in nine people on this entire earth are Christian.

These numbers are truths. Do you want to know more truths? There are children all over the world who are sick, starving, dying, unloved and uncared for. There are 143 million orphaned children on this planet and 11 million children who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and there are 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes or under other horrific conditions. And there are 2.3 million who live with HIV because of someone else's carelessness. That adds up to 164.8 million needy children. Yes, that is a ginormous number. But you need to remember that there are 7 billion people on this earth and of that population, at least 2.1 billion people claim to be Christians. That means that if only 8% of the Christians in this world would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left to report. Holy cow. 

In my post entitled "Transparency", I wrote about how I want to live my life radically for God's glory. Sometimes I wonder if the Lord will call me to live in a third-world country like Rwanda full-time after I finish my pediatrics residency. The idea of selling all of my possessions and moving to the missions field used to sound like lunacy to me. I am just an ordinary girl. Selling all of your things and moving to a new country to work as a missionary is what people with really, really strong faiths and a ton of courage do (at least, that's what I used to think). While that idea still scares and intimidates me a good bit, it doesn't sound like such a far-fetched one. If it's truly what the Lord calls me to do in the future, I know that He'll give me the courage and faith to up and move. After all, He doesn't call the qualified but He qualifies the called. 

The statistics listed above are the truth. I believe that we, both you and I, have been given the freedom and the resources and the opportunity to do something about those statistics. The truth is that Jesus loves all of these 164.8 million needy children every bit as much as He loves you and me. Why were these children born into impoverished countries and into families that couldn't take care of them and why was I born into a family of means in a country with abundant food, shelter, clothing and other resources? I don't know. I can only think that it's for God's glory, somehow, someway. Like the man in John, chapter 9, who was born blind. When the disciples asked Jesus what the man did to be born in such a condition, Jesus responded, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this has happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life." 

God is sovereign over every person's life and every person's circumstance. He loves each and every singe one of His children deeply. We are all broken, needy, dirty and messy and still we are all adopted into His family because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. We are each and every single one of us a child of the King. And now that you and I know about all of those needy children out there in this great, wide world, we are both responsible. "To whom much has been given, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked," Luke 12:48.