Hunger, again...

 

 

"How rich are we? Most of us are in the top 1% of the world's population..."

This upcoming week our church will do its part to help curb world hunger. Our goal is to package 2.5 million meals for the world's hungriest people in less than a week. That is an awesome goal. Our church is partnered with Feed My Starving Children, an organization of immense talent and reputation in the fight against world hunger. This marvelous organization, which is headquartered right here in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was able to package and deliver over 50 million meals last year!

One might think that solves the problem. Case closed. On to the next issue. The only problem is this - as impressive as that number is, it only puts a small dent in world hunger. Over the past three years, the UN has estimated that nearly 870 million people, or one in eight of us, suffer from chronic undernourishment. Many of those people starve to death. In order to give this number of people just one wholesome meal a day, we would need to supply 317,550,000,000 meals in a year. As laudatory as 50,000,000 meals seems, it is way less than one percent of what is needed.

In our country, we have plenty of food. Some say an obscene amount of it. The hungry in this country are hungry only because of a distribution issue - not resources. Nobody in this country should ever starve to death. However, the hungry in many parts of the world, especially the Third World, are hungry primarily due to resources. In other words, there simply is not enough food to feed the population.

By an accident of birth, many of us dine daily in the Horn of Plenty. We go to the grocery store and are confronted with hundreds of choices on everything tasty. The only problem we have is over selection. We eat our fill, while every day over 4,000 die from starvation or drinking bad water. Can we ever fix this to completion? No. However, while none of us can do everything, all of us can do something.

 What can we do to help?

• Contribute money or time to organizations such as Feed My Starving Children.
• Buy a share in a deep well to be dug in a country which has very little clean water.
• Buy a $5 bag of donated food when you go to the grocery store.
• Write letters to Congress telling them we must stop burning our corn for ethanol.

The Bible is very clear on this issue. Turning a blind eye or a deaf ear is not acceptable. We cannot be spectators to this issue, we need to participate. As the old saying goes, "For whom much has been given, much is expected..."