Africa Journal July 8

I am grateful for the strength you have all given me. There is so much sadness in this country. Some days it threatens to overwhelm me. The suffering of my fellow men is great and deep. I feel sorrow that so many people in our country live in comfort, unaware of the poverty of their brothers and sisters; a poverty which to see brings me to tears.

There is so much work to be done in countries such as this one. The streets are as full of garbage as they are people. Though medical attention is free, disease is everywhere; disease which could be prevented by a habit of better sanitation. Yet, the habits of a nation are hardly altered, and for one voice, or even a few, the task seems fruitless.

Still, I have learned much of the joy of the Lord. His love reaches these far corners of the earth and makes the suffering bearable. It makes the heart hopeful for a better future, and gives comfort in the knowledge that this suffering is but a moment, and for their faith in the poverty of the world and humility of heart, they will receive kingdoms of greater wealth and peace than ever was their suffering. In this, I sorrow for my own life, and those I love back home, that in our prosperity we forget to be humble. We forget to have faith in God; rather, we take credit for our successes and become greedy in our imagined need. When we should praise God that he has given us a home, we curse that it is not big enough, warm enough, clean enough, or beautiful enough. We whine when our technology fails, yet rejoice not that we have been blessed with bodies and minds surpassing the capabilities of all creations of man. We see in our lives a lacking which we try to fill with temporal things, new cars, new toys, new clothes, and all other things created for the comfort and luxury of man. Yet, these things do not fill our lacking. If anything, they intensify it by feeding our ego and crippling our independence. For example, who of us has washed laundry entirely by hand? Very few, if any, of us in the U.S. would do such a thing. Even if we are not blessed to have washers and dryers in our homes, there are laundromats in every city so that even the poor people of our nation need not wash clothes by hand. I wonder, though, that we do not notice our disability. Though washing clothes by hand is simple enough, when I came to Liberia, I did not know how it was done. We are so dependent on our technology that it has become a crutch to aid an imaginary cripple.

It is my wish that we strive more to free ourselves and those we love from captivity. Let us recognize the potential within us to become independent, that when our technology fails, our money is gone, and we are faced with the poverty of nations that we will not shrink from the task, but soldier on with strength of knowledge that in our bodies, our minds, and especially in our hearts, we are free to change the world.