No more Band-aids or just talking about justice

After being exposed to ways that Christians are beginning to address deep issues of humanity, I chase after learning and grasping better ideas and stories of how people have helped solve simple basic deep issues that are only known by people that understand their local context.

When I say local context, I am usually discussing within a extremely small vicinity of a half mile, or mile radius. Sometimes even within a quarter mile.

I just read about a story of mountain folks in Rich Christians In an Age of Hunger, by, Ronald Sider. The story is about a small village at the base of a mountain that has winding, slippery roads with hairpin turns without guard rails. Instead of the government, or outsiders intervening, a group of Christians in the village pulled together to run an ambulance service that would rush to the injured and take them to the hospital. This service was also purely voluntarily run. I thought this was an amazing notion of an innovative way for the church to meet the needs of humanity! I am sure this took a lot of hard work, and people gave to an extent to which it hurt.

Which, this was a great act of service, but there is more to be done. There is more to the story. One day a visitor questioned why they haven’t put in a tunnel, or close the road. One possible reason why they didn’t do either because the road had been there a long time, and that the mayor would not approve. He wouldn’t want to approve because he owned a restaurant, and service station halfway up the mountain. The Christians of the Volunteer Ambulance service were shocked, and probably didn’t think twice about forsaking the restaurant and service station for the sake of others.

We often want to be ignorant of societal structures that we subtly benefit from. In the case of the Volunteer Ambulance folks they probably didn’t think twice about it being a problem because it has been apart of their lives for so long that it was accepted and ok. They were not awakened to the injustice of the situation, they subtly bought into the lie. It often takes outsiders to see issues, but it is from within that can make the change possible. If the road had changed since that time, then this would be a great case of not just teaching a man how to fish, but teaching him how to restock the pond.

Lets think a little bit harder, and be ok with tough questions and persecution!