Cindy Fisher
|
FALLS CHURCH—“$2.19,” the cashier says after I place my order for a small iced coffee. I’m tempted to order an iced latte instead, but that would bump up the price by a dollar. I choose to stick with the plain iced coffee.
As I sit at my desk, trying to focus on work, I’m nagged by the $2.19. “It’s such a small amount,” I tell myself, “and it’s helping me do God’s work. That certainly justifies the cost.”
With deadlines to meet at work, a fall emphasis to prepare for at church, and two young children who need their “mommy time,” the caffeine boost feels like a dire necessity.
But I go to bed knowing that 25,000 people have died today, not from some unforeseeable calamity or an unpreventable “act of God,” but from hunger—a problem that persists precisely because of the choices we make each day.
“For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,” Jesus warns, “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:42 and 44).
The next morning as I prepare for work, keeping an eye on the clock all the while, I know that hunger will cause 12 children to die in the hour that elapses, one child every five seconds. Can those deaths possibly be justified?
“If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered,” the Bible says (Proverbs 21:13).
And as I contemplate buying a coffee, I know that it takes only 25 cents for the UN World Food Program to provide porridge, rice or beans to one malnourished child. Eight children would be fed by a donation of $2.19. Might those eight, if unaided, soon be among a day’s tally of 25,000 dead?
“Be openhanded to your brothers and the poor and needy in your land,” God commands (Deuteronomy 15:11).
If every time we made a purchase we were told the cost in human lives, would we choose to spend our money differently? If every expenditure of time, effort and talent was quantified by lives lost or saved, would we spend our lives differently? How do we spend ourselves? How should we spend ourselves?
“Eight lives,” the cashier says after I place my order. “No, thanks,” I reply and turn away. Eight lives is too high a price to pay for a small iced coffee.