Awaiting it's arrival

Here are a few excerpts from this book I just ordered - The Hole in Our Gospel - and can not wait for it to get here.

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"Let me use a different example. If you read in a newspaper about hundreds of children dying of malnutrition in a famine in Africa, you might pause for a moment of genuine sadness--but wouldn't you finally turn the page, read the sports section, check the TV listings, and go about your daily routine? But imagine for a moment that you somehow discovered one of these starving African children dying on your front doorstep the very next morning as you left for Church. Would you not stop everything, pick up the child, and rush her to the emergency room, offering to pay whatever it might cost to save her life? You would almost certainly respond with urgency as one human being to another, and that faraway famine you had read about the night before would very suddenly become intensely personal. You see, our problem is that the plight of suffering children in a far-off land simply hasn't gotten personal for us. We may hear about them with sorrow, but we haven't really been able to look at them as if they were our own children. If we could, then we would surely grieve more deeply in our spirits. We would weep for their parents, and we would respond with far greater urgency" (The Hole in Our Gospel, p. 59)

"The total income of American churchgoers is $5.2 trillion. (That’s more than $5,000 billion.) It would take just a little over 1 percent of the income of American Christians to lift the poorest 1 billion people out of extreme poverty. Said another way, American Christians, who make up about 5 percent of the Church worldwide, control about half of global Christian wealth; a lack of money is not our problem." (The Hole in Our Gospel, p. 216)

"Almost one in seven worldwide, 854 million people, do not have enough food to sustain them. This makes hunger/malnutrition the number one risk to health globally, greater than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. About 25,000 people die each day of hunger or related causes—9 million people per year." (The Hole in Our Gospel, p.135)

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I am so excited to read this book, to see what new things it speaks to my heart, and to see how it will continue to change me so that I love on the least of these. I'll leave you with one last thought.....

DID YOU KNOW THAT ONE CHILD DIES EVERY 5 SECONDS FROM HUNGER RELATED ISSUES?? ........... HOW MANY CHILDREN JUST DIED WHILE YOU READ THIS POST???

And does the thought of that bother you enough for you to do something, anything, about it??