National Prayer Breakfast

I just finished reading the keynote speech from this year's National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The speech was given by Ward Brehm, a Minnesotan businessman and philanthropist who was recently appointed chairman of the African Development Foundation, a United States government agency with a mission to help African community-based organizations and small businesses achieve sustainable economic growth. Although I found his overall speech less moving than the one given by Bono in 2006, I thought I would share a couple exerts:

"On a more recent visit [to Africa], I took a long walk with a warrior-turned-pastor friend named Lodinyo deep into the unknown wilderness along the northern Rift Valley that divides northwest Kenya with Uganda…I fasted for five days on this walk to experience real hunger, but had brought along power bars in the case of, as Lodinyo put it, an “emergency”. At the end of the walk, I collapsed in a borrowed sleeping hut, and when I awoke 12 hours later, I saw a little boy peeking through the door. While he was initially terrified, curiosity eventually got the best of him, and I noticed he was concentrating more on my stash of power bars than he was on me. He succeeded in snatching the bars and immediately ran away. “Kids are the same everywhere,” I thought, until I stepped outside the hut, and found a little boy kneeling over his two-year old sister with a terribly distended stomach, feeding her tiny pieces of protein."

"Solzhenitsyn said that disaster is defined by two things: magnitude and distance. So a small disaster close to home or a huge disaster faraway results in what he describes as “bearable disasters of bearable proportions.” We’ve become too good at “bearing.” Our hearts should be broken by the things that break the heart of God. Specifically in Africa, there are many faraway disasters of epic proportions. 1994. In Rwanda, a country the size of Maryland, the political genocide claimed 9,000 lives per day for 90 days. That’s two World Trade Center disasters per day for 3 months. Today. Darfur, Sudan. 1.5 million homeless, with thousands terrorized raped and killed. AIDS is killing 4,400 per day in Africa, and even more are dying from curable malaria. Epic disasters of epic proportions far from home for most of us."

"Do you remember when Jesus was talking to His disciples, and asked them when He was hungry, why they didn’t give Him any food, and when He was naked, why they didn’t give Him any clothes? And the disciples said something like, “Lord, we never did any of those things to You.” I always thought like most folks that Jesus replied “Whenever you did this to the least of these, you did this on to Me.” Except He didn’t say that. What He said was, “Whenever you did this to one of the least of these, you did this on to Me.” How often do we forget the word “one.” It changes the meaning of what Jesus said completely. In our quest to be helpful, we can rob the poor of their dignity. In order to be of any help to the poor, we need to understand them, we need to know them and we need to love them. They are not a group. The poor is not a species. They are identical to us in their hopes and dreams. They love their families and long for a better life. The only difference is that they are poor. And people don’t suffer and die in groups. It’s one at a time. And each one of those deaths leaves an identical wake of agony to what you and I and our families would experience."