I am glad my children lack nothing. It makes me so happy as a parent to know that I can supply them with every good thing: nutritionally, materially, spiritually. They are, without argument:
PRIVILEGED.
But they have no awareness of this fact. They live in that place suspended between middle-grown kids and babies, that place where there is an awareness that sometimes they do not get the things they would like, but a naivete, because in the end their needs are always met. When they tell me: “Mom, I’m hungry”, I sometimes think to myself “No, you do not know hunger. You know that you would like a snack, but you do not know hunger. Not real hunger”.
When they grumble about our daily devotions as a family, I remind them that there are scores of people around the world- other kids like them- who would DIE to have the freedom and access to “just” a Bible. And there are plenty of people jailed up or running afraid because they cannot freely worship.
And when they say that “it’s not fair”, I increasingly remind them: “You are right. It is not fair”. But since the dawn of time, life has not been fair, and so proceed gratefully. Because nothing is going to change for you. And on a global scale, “unfair” is not a claim we can make.
They are unintentionally, bubble-kids. So privileged they lack context for any other way. What is hunger? What is thirst? What is need? What is fear? What is freedom? All these things are concepts without tangibility. They see what they can, but then no more because their eyes are blinded by vast….wealth and the comfort it provides.
I recently finished reading Revolution in World Missions. Written by the founder of Gospel for Asia, it presents information so challenging and simultaneously heart-breaking, it would take hours to write about, and I lack the time. But here is the catch:
WHAT WILL WE DO?
My family and I. Not what “can we do?”, because that is easily non-committal. But what “will we do”?
A New Year’s resolution still in progress is to seek out ministry opportunities that the kids can participate in. To watch them become hands and feet. To teach them to give and to care. And not for any self-righteous sense of gaining society’s label of “good person”, but because the Bible clearly states a truth for them: “To whom much is given, much is expected”.
They have so much. Their lives are full of beautiful sunrises and sunsets, figuratively and literally. But my job as parent is not to make sure that they always feel warmth and light, but to ensure that they can be uncomfortable and be perhaps jarred out of child-apathy.
So, in order to put wings to this resolution, I intend to write in one week about which opportunity we are committing to. My accountability will be this site. And this post.
It is not intrinsically “bad” to be privileged. It is what anyone would wish for, and God has created us to work and aspire. But it is a reality that many simply go without from birth to death without. And so my question to myself remains: What WILL we do?
