built for glory

Disaster...relief

In regards to everyone's incredible generosity toward tsunami relief work and the contrasting stinginess toward other causes, particularly AIDS...
"Why is our generosity so stymied by this sort of prejudice?"
"Is there a stigma at work in that situation or is it just our navel-gazing that keeps us from being generously involved?"

Here are my thoughts on the matter: With something like a tsunami, there are, for one thing, very few political situations that require working around. That said, I think the bigger issue is simply the relief that we feel after helping "fix" a disaster. Everyone feels the burden of our bent world, and cleaning up after a natural disaster is fulfilling because of all the positive media coverage and a feeling that there's an end to it all in near sight.

With longer-running, more complicated causes (genocide in Sudan, poverty in Haiti, AIDS throughout Africa, the list goes on and on and on...), I think we just don't know where to start, and when we DO start, it can often feel like we're throwing our money into a black hole.

(Warning: analogy time!) Consider a cup of water. If it suddenly tips over, you rush to clean it up quickly, and everything can go back to normal. If there's a hole in the cup, though, you might not even notice it at first. Then, you might just observe a puddle of water and not realize that it's the cup that is leaking. Then you might not be able to find the hole, and when you do, there are a number of options for what to do. Can you fix it? Does the whole cup need replacing? Is this going to cost a lot? Maybe if we put a piece of tape on it, that will hold for now...

Basically, we have an inate desire to see things become perfect and whole, and we don't have God's patience or vision.

That's my theory. My question is, how do we climb out of our narrow little mindset and grow a more eternal one?