Perhaps…

What happens when you take a business trip and find hundreds of children with no homes and no food?

What happens when your job takes you to a place where widows live in poverty with no hope for providing for themselves or their families?

What happens when your work places you in an area where preventable disease claims the lives of one too many children.

What do you do if you discover that many of these widows sell themselves into prostitution simply to feed their families?

What do you do if you find that the local mosque is enslaving these women in poverty by paying these widows $1 a day to study the Koran instead of looking for work or education?

What do you do if you believe Jesus actually meant it when He said he identifies with the poor and the marginalized?

I don’t know what I would do, but Joanna Ilboudo started an orphanage.

Joanna lives in Burkina Faso, which is a small country in West Africa about the size of Colorado. Burkina Faso is the 4th poorest country in the world, and it is the poster child for all of the relevant buzzwords in the social justice communities: Africa, AIDS, orphans, widows, poverty, disease, drought. When Joanna’s work assignment took her to the villages in Saonre, Burkina Faso, she discovered a people without hope. She found a community that was not at all a community.

So she quit her job and set herself to the task of giving these people hope in the name of Jesus. In 2002, she purchased a small plot of land and began to lay the foundation for a ministry center called ACTS. For the past few years, she has been housing, feeding, educating, and teaching the ways of Jesus to scores of orphans and widows. She has instituted micro-enterprise programs in which the orphans and widows produce self-sustaining income. She has been educating the orphans and widows, most of whom never made it past the 1st grade. And she has been doing so with very little infrastructure and even fewer resources.

I will be joining a group of friends from our church in Los Angeles to travel to Burkina Faso this August. We will spend two weeks building a dormitory, playing with the kids, teaching widows how to knit, teaching orphans carpentry skills, teaching Bible lessons, sharing the Gospel with the villagers, and discovering that Jesus is not only the God of America. This trip will be a monumental event in our lives as none of us have seen this level of poverty firsthand. I know that we will be confronted with our own complicity in the global divide between the rich and the poor, and I imagine we will return with a greater sense of what Paul meant when he said: “Right now you have plenty and can help them…”

In preparation for our trip, I asked Joanna to list every need that exists at this ministry center. I told her to dream big and not withhold any request, because we both serve a God who owns everything anyway. What she came back with surpassed my own expectations: dormitories, a clinic, a kitchen, toilets, fresh water wells, sewing machines, grain mills, solar fruit dryers, clothes, shoes, medicines, vitamins, weaving looms, beds, pots, pans, books, toothbrushes. The list goes on and on. And what struck me about her list of needs is that they were all pretty much actual needs. She didn’t ask for an iPhone.

Her entire list of needs totals $250,000. That’s a lot of money. But that’s not that much money if you think about it. Consider the average church building program. Or the amount we regularly spend on cars and houses and boats and jeans and eating out and video games. And all that money will provide food, shelter, education, and hope to hundreds of orphans and widows who otherwise will live without.

We spoke of sacrifice a few months ago. Since that time, I have gone without lunch 16 times and have deposited $80 in my sacrifice fund. The awareness that sacrifice has brought to my life has loosened my grip on other treasures I have buried in my life. I am now looking to invest this money.

So I would like to invite you to consider helping me meet some of these needs. I’ll give you a few examples of what we can do:

-The widows are learning how to sew items for sale to produce their own income; you can buy one of them a treadle sewing machine for $165 and put another unemployed widow to work.

-The orphans only have one pair of clothes apiece that they share with each other; for $50 you can buy outfits for 10 of these kids.

-The orphanage just got its first fresh water well for drinking water but is in need of a second for cooking, hygiene, and their agricultural efforts; for $10,000 we can dig them that well.

-Three of the orphans cannot walk and need wheelchairs, but they do not have the funds to buy them; for $150, you can give one of these kids a chance to fly.

-And maybe you want to just go big: Joanna told me that dormitories are her biggest need as the orphans cry to her each day to let them stay with her, but she has to send them away; for $35,000 we can put a roof over the heads of 25 kids who don’t have a home.

The bottom line is that any $1 you have that you don’t need for something else can be used to meet a basic need of someone who has nothing.

My temptation is to try and make this request witty and intellectually sophisticated because I know I am dealing with a clever crowd. But the call is just too simple. These people have needs, and we have the means to meet those needs. That’s it.

Whether or not God intends for this you, as part of this community, to meet that need is an entirely different question. Seeing a need does not always constitute meeting a need. The call of the Bible towards joyful generosity is overwhelmingly clear. God even gives us some guidance on those whom we should support: pastors, teachers, widows, orphans, the poor, our families, and each other. But He lists no names, no ministries, no countries. He simply tells us to go and tell the world about Him and to generously give to others along the way. So I am under no illusion that God is definitely asking you to help orphans or widows in Burkina Faso.

But perhaps this is one of the thousand reasons God put this community together. Perhaps God means for us to gather each week to feast on one another’s thoughts, to discuss what it means to be followers of Christ in a culture where the pure and simple truth of the Gospel is buried beneath a mound of distractions and debates and debauchery. Perhaps we are ready as a group to corporately move from words to action. Perhaps this might be a time to harness the passions and energy of this group to effect real change for people who are in desperate need of it.

Perhaps God brought us together so that some women and children most of us will never meet can have a roof to sleep under or a drink of clean water or a shot at 6th grade.

Perhaps God is asking you to meet this need.