Diet pet food and other complicated issues…

Today as I loaded groceries in the waiting taxi who had agreed to take us through protests to go home, and pushed all four kids into the car I was shouting directions at the cab driver and gave a huge sigh when we started driving and all the kids were safely in the car and not wandering the street. It was only after our hurried bartering regarding cost and direction giving was through that I noticed the girls had tears streaming down their cheeks.

“Mom, they cried, did you see him?”

I hadn’t seen “him” and actually had no idea what they were talking about, my eyes had been on trying to load into the cars and my ears attuned to trying to understand and communicate in my second language and my mind upon the task of navigating four kids through a city in disrupt over protests.

I kissed their cheeks, smoothed their hair and watched tears form dust tails down their cheeks.

“He had no legs and no arm, and no shower and no food. Mom can’t we give him our groceries? Can he come home with us? What if he doesn’t have a family can we be his?”

We talked about what we couldn’t do, travel back through the protest, unload our groceries and try and get another cab, and then what we could do next time we saw him and what we could do right then. We talked about how we weren’t near him but who was and my girls prayed, out loud in that cab, for that man all the way home. They prayed for food, they prayed for healing, they prayed he would get a family to give him showers and a bed at night.

For some problems there are no easy solutions. No simple math problem to plug figures into an equation and get a happy ending – that man on the street will probably sleep there tonight.

The other day we were watching a program online with commercials from our passport country. Repeatedly we watched a commercial for “diet pet food” to help your dog get back to his/her ideal weight. After about the third viewing J– turned to me and said, “really? we really come from a country that needs diet food for pets?

Dogs in our passport country apparently are overweight, but it is not a simply balanced equation, we cannot ship excess dog food to South Sudan to help starvation. William didn’t finish his dinner but I couldn’t run it outside to feed the children on the street without causing a street fight. The dogs in America need diet food to keep weight off and the dogs in South Sudan are dying of starvation and we cannot simply redistribute food around to fix the problem without creating a host of new ones.

So where does that leave us, we cannot do nothing, but we cannot do everything. There are no simple answers but the lack of clarity is not a reason for a lack of action either.

Some dogs are sick from starvation and others from being overweight but the reality is that they are both sick and they both need help, but we cannot help them in the same way and sometimes our attempts to help aren’t enough.

I find this a hard tension to live in, overweight and starving, rich and poor, safe and running in fear. They exist simultaneously all around us at the same time. I cannot equalize the playing field, I cannot solve the problems.

We live with another tension that is hard to deal with, the tension of knowing the one who can multiply fish, turn water to wine, part the sea and sometimes chooses not to but is still fully good and fully God.

This year in South Sudan aid organizations are estimating that more people will die of starvation in the coming months then died in six months of fighting. They are estimating 50,000 will die of starvation in South Sudan alone.

50,000

….meanwhile dogs on the other side of the world need diet food.

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One of things flower girl prayed on our cab home through congested streets is bouncing around my head along with the tensions, she prayed,

“God can you help him (the beggar on the street) know that you love him, that you care for him, that you even cry for him and that one day you will make all things new.”

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So we must somehow come to grips with this dichotomy of plenty and want and never lose this longing for the tears and hunger to be no more.

We keep our eyes on this goal because one day when all is made right our God will do just that.  Somehow we must continue to exist in a way where we can compassionately cry over needs that have no simple solution even while we feed our pets diet food. It is not an excuse for inactivity but an acknowledgement that in this world not all can be righted.

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My girls know that some people don’t have enough to eat, they have friends who can only eat 1 or 2 meals a day while they have three and a snack. They cry tears over it, they try and figure ways to mail milk to South Sudan, or save a slice of cake for the beggars on the street and they wrestle with tears that there isn’t a simple equation to fix the problem.

Something happened in the cab ride home I didn’t expect. As the girls talked to God their conversations shifted away from the problem to the one who held the solution. They began to acknowledge in their prayers God’s power, strength, omnipotence and grace and while the man still sat on the corner their hearts were comforted that he was seen by a good God.

—–There is a piece of cake wrapped in cellophane in our fridge ready to be placed in a backpack and given to the man when we next run errands. The cake won’t solve world hunger, it won’t provide shelter, or restore missing limbs, it may even leave in its wake hunger but it is how my flower girl is participating in loving others where she has been placed. She isn’t too concerned that her slice of cake won’t solve world hunger, she is just glad to give a slice of cake to a man who looked hungry.

Perhaps this is why diet pet food becomes a complicated issue, giving your dog special food doesn’t solve world hunger, but it may save your dog, and giving money for aid may not solve the problem of starvation, or greed, or overweight pets but it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.

May our inability to solve problems never hinder us from faithfulness with what we’ve been given, and may unsolved problems bring us greater longing for our Savior instead of despair.

 

Links:

The threat of starvation in South Sudan in Pictures

The humanitarian crisis in South Sudan in 60 seconds

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There are many organizations working to help reduce the devastating man-made famine in South Sudan. Three organizations we really appreciate that are working on the ground in our home of Upper Nile are:

Grain for pain

SIM SOUTH SUDAN through the Grieve medical clinic nutritional village program

Samaritans Purse