The Insulation Prayer

No photos for this post, just a few thoughts.

Tonight at the nightly service, the praise and worship leader led everyone in a song he had written about a week ago. Before he started the song, he told the story about how he had come to write the song. The story went something like this...

The worship leader had come down to Mexico a couple weeks earlier to check out the situation in Mexico for his church(the crackdown on the drug cartels has some parents of campers worried). On his flight back he was feeling concern for the kids he had met in Mexico while he was down there. He felt bad that he had air conditioning and food and luxuries, and felt like he should really be doing more for the poor in Mexico. But then, "God moved in him" and he realized God was taking care of the Mexican families, and he didn't need to feel guilty for the American blessings he had. He used the verse from the Bible telling us how we shouldn't worry because God takes care of even birds and plants to back this up. After the song, which implored God to help us remember that he is in control, he led the congregation in a prayer where he asked that God help the campers not to feel guilty when the work day in the colonia is over and they get back on their air conditioned vans and head back to America.

We Americans want our air conditioning. We want our smooth roads, our cheap clothes and our clean water. We don't want to see the poverty everywhere around us. We don't want to face that problem because we can hear God calling out to us through it, crying for us to abandon our own desires and be fulfilled in his. But sometimes seeing the poverty is inevitable, so we come up with insulation: Reasons and ways of thinking that let us explain away the poverty and keep our riches for ourselves.

God's real call is not to insulate ourselves with explanations so we don't feel guilty knowing we're withholding so much of our wealth from the poor in the world. God's real call is for us to let go of the material things that cause our guilt and take part in his economy of unconditional love.