Wednesday 28 November 2007

Secretary’s Soapbox

We had a visit from Pastor Daniel Ogutu and his wife, Magdeline, last Sunday. Eddy especially liked seeing the presentation showing the children from the Mathare Valley who Daniel & Magdeline were called to help.
During the week he suddenly said to me, “When I am bigger I am going to be a builder, a scientist and a piano player.”
“Are you?” I said, thinking that I would much prefer him to be a vet!
“Yes!” he said, “then I can go and give all the money I earn to the poor children in America and only keep one penny of it for me.”
“Do you mean the ones you saw on Sunday, because they live in Africa?”
“Do you have to have injections to go to Africa?” said Eddy.
“Yes you do.”
“Then I’m not going to go to Africa I will just send them some money instead!”
The answer for poverty is so simple from a child’s point of view, isn’t it? All you have to do is give them all your money. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. We have so many things which call for our money, if we live in a house we have to buy furniture, keep up with breakages, maintain the property and of course, pay the council tax, heating bills, water rates, telephone etc Then to maintain ourselves we need clothes, dental health, haircuts, shoes, I could go on and on. All these things we have to have in order to live in our society, don’t we?
If we lived in a place like Kenya, in the beautiful parts of the country, in a mud hut with very few clothes but still had the amount of money that we get each week, we would feel rich and we could afford to give our money away because we wouldn’t have the need to spend it. But that is not a practical solution, all we can do is give what our hearts tell us to give, to pray that somehow our offering will be sufficient to help change the lives of those that have so little.
God Bless, Cyn