Eating an Elephant

My weekend was filled with big and overwhelming ideas...

Sunday morning began with 8 regional interviews for the BBC talking about our Campaign this October. In it we were talking about 100 million Christians praying the same prayer, and 10 million promises.  And the same question came over and over again: If there are over 1 billion people living in extreme poverty, 9 million children dying every year before the age of 5 and 500,000 women dying in child birth what difference can we possibly make to such huge statistics?  And in any event is there any proof that governments are changing their minds on the issue?

It reminds me of that well used question: how do you eat an elephant?

And following my broadcasts I went along to Hillsong London where they were talking about support for their campaign against human trafficking.  Everybody was reminded that 29 million people are trafficked today - more than at any time in history.

And then I finished the day at a birthday party and heard from a member of my extended family who had recently returned from a trip to his homeland in Africa.  How did it go I asked?  It was great to be home again he said, but the problem of the level of corruption was very disturbing.  As he put it, it’s everywhere. So I asked how the church was doing in tackling the epidemic? That made him even more depressed.  It’s just as bad in the church, he said.  Some pastors are worse than anyone else!

But this morning one of my daily MDG updates came through on my mobile phone.  It included an article which said that the UN was confident that with some exceptions the developing world was on target for achieving the MDGs.  Places like Mexico and India are moving ahead so fast that, according to some analysts, their performance is distorting the results. And yet another email covering the Africa Union summit has shown a commitment from African leaders to tackle infant mortality and maternal deaths with even more vigilance.

But perhaps the most helpful advice came from Gary Clarke the senior pastor at Hillsong.  All of this big news he said can give you overload and actually make you do nothing. It’s easy to ask, what difference our actions make in the scheme of things. But as Pastor Clarke put it, if you want to know what difference it makes, ask the individuals whose lives we have changed by our actions.

In Micah Challenge we are involved in the big task of halving extreme poverty.  It’s a real elephant but we eat it with millions of people taking small bites at a time.