Lost or Found?

For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the relative prosperity of the developed world we are generally accustomed to having things go well for us in life. We have a minimum set of expectations that include having comfortable shelter, adequate clothing, and enough food to satisfy our desires. In fact our expectations have steadily risen beyond the basic necessities of life to include the expectation that we can and will enjoy many of the prosperous extras of our culture. We have a strong entitlement attitude that is a part of our emotional makeup. Our expectations have risen to the point that when occasionally things do not go our way it is very easy for us to quickly become critical and negative. I am afraid we have developed, far to frequently, into a generation of whiners. However, for the people that New Hope Initiative ministers to, those living in the developing world, their expectations are often a great deal more basic than ours. They expect life to be hard. They are never shocked when difficult times arise. They intensely enjoy times of blessings, but they have no expectation that these good times will continue. I witnessed a great illustration of this attitude when we came across a young man in Kibera this summer who only had one shoe. Looking from the cultural perspective of a 21st century American we immediately formed an opinion of the situation and asked him how he had lost his other shoe. I will never forget the straightforward, yet incredibly insightful answer of this young man. "I didn't lose a shoe...I found one."

We should all learn a lesson from the simple wisdom of this young man. Life is sweeter, life is more intensely enjoyed, life is considerably more blessed when we set aside our expectations, when we shelve the entitlement philosophy of our generation and begin to be appreciative of every joy, every blessing, and every found shoe in life. This week why don't you try to focus on the things you have found, instead of the things you have lost! A shoe found is a lot more enjoyable than a shoe that has been lost.

By Sandy Baird - Director of New Hope Initiative

The Sum Total of All Things

Have you ever done an inventory of your personal possessions? Maybe for insurance or estate purposes you sat down and determined the approximate value of all the things you own. For most Americans it is a staggering list: vehicles, furniture, electronics, kitchenware, clothing, linens, and the other assorted pieces of junk that populate our lives. We fill up our homes, our closets, our attics and garages and then we have to go and rent storage spaces to hold all the overflow things. Do you have an idea of the dollar value or replacement value of all these things? With that dollar figure in mind let me tell you a story about a tragic event that happened in the Kibera slum of Nairobi Kenya last month. Late on a Sunday evening a tragic fire swept through that neighborhood. The very nature of this community makes it a fireman’s worst nightmare. The stick and mud homes are literally attached to one another; there are no streets, little running water, mounds of trash and combustible materials. On that particular night the fire raged and they could not get it under control until hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of people displaced. New Hope Initiative is directly connected to at least 100 people that were affected. These are members of our church, students at our school, and leaders in Project Biashara. We asked Pastor Simon what we could do to help those that were affected by the fire and he told us that 20,000 shillings or about $200 could replace most of the things these families lost. Let that number sink in for a moment, $200 would replace every single thing these families owned! All the furniture, housewares, clothes, linens, every worldly possession for the entire family could be replaced by an amount of money that most of us would think of as pretty insignificant.

My point is not to try and motivate you to give to help these victims, we have had churches and individuals who have already stepped up and we are in the process of helping these families recover. My purpose in this story is to motivate us to look at our closets, attics, garages, and storage sheds and to determine how many things we really need in order to enjoy our lives. Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to make you feel guilty, we should enjoy the blessings of God and be thankful for the incredible privilege of living as a 21^st Century American. However what I am trying to get us to consider is this, can we live with less so that others can have more. Could we reduce the amount of clutter in our lives so that others could enjoy some of the basic necessities? Could simpler lives actually lead to a greater personal fulfillment? If you lost everything in a tragic fire how much of it would really have meaning to you?

By Sandy Baird - Director of New Hope Initiative