Now for part 2 (or back to part 1), a few thoughts on “The Hole in Our Gospel”… A book written by Richard Stearns, President of World Vision. “The Hole in Our Gospel” has been one of the most challenging books to my faith that I’ve read in a long time. Stearns shares his journey of how he became President of World Vision. It’s an interesting story of leaving his highly successful run at the American Dream to a more fulfilling call on his life to love and care for the poor, the broken, the downtrodden, etc… By no means does he make it seem like he’s living without though… or that it was an easy and super sugary decision! He shares heartbreaking, but also uplifting stories from around the world. He shares statistics and figures, but also puts faces and names to the poor and the hurting that he and World Vision works with. At times, the stories are too much to take in, and at times you just want to shed a few tears of joy in experiencing the triumph and success of the people he writes about. In many of the disasters that have happened since Corrie and I have been married, we have usually given to World Vision to help. So it was cool to get to see some of the history and the stories from where World Vision came from. After reading this book, we felt lead to give towards the project of building clean water wells in places that have no clean water, and/or are very far away from a well or clean water source because I was so impacted by the suffering and hardship of what not having clean water can do to people. I certainly don’t write that to pat myself on the back for giving, but instead to share of the deep impact this book made on me. A few other things that hit me while reading this book were:
- I admit it was really crazy for me to process a section on how many child die each day from preventable diseases that a simple vaccination could save them from. We have a number of friends who have chosen not to vaccinate their own children here in the States, for varies reasons. And this in no way is commentary on what I think parents should do either. I believe in the freedom we are given here to make choices for our kids that we feel are in their best interest… honestly. But I also struggled through the thoughts that, the very vaccinations that some of of our friends reject for their children, could very possibly save the lives of other children around the world. I’m not sure what to do with that still…
- Stearns shared a bunch of figures in terms of how much people spend money on including things like eating out, entertainment, education and video games, etc… A figure he also gave was how much it would cost to pull those in poverty, out of poverty, which was less than we spend on video games in a year. Let’s just say it was convicting for me. Not in a “I’m never playing or buying a video game again” way, but to look at how much we truly give away to help, as opposed to how much my family focuses on ourselves - and our wants.
- The last thing that really impacted me was a little lesson on the power of a personal story or face, over a plea using overwhelming numbers or stats. Stearns made a point to show how much more people get involved and help when there is a personal story, or a face or name attached to something, more than when presented with an astronomical number or statistic. People seem to respond so much better to “This is a story about little Billy, who is dying of disease “X” or “Y”, as apposed to “2 million people die of disease “X” or “Y” each year”. There is something to connecting to a real live human that tends to move us far more than a huge number. Not sure if that’s really a good thing or not, but I think it’s an important observation when trying to help people.
All in all, “The Hole in Our Gospel” challenged me in so many ways. It challenged my selfishness. It challanged my apathy toward the poor and hurting around the world… and down the street. It challenged, my motivation for giving… sacrificially.
