Seeking Justice

Last night I attended All Campus Worship at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and the featured speaker was Larry Martin from International Justice Mission. This is an organization of attorneys and social workers that work to bring justice and the release from oppression of victims all over the world. On a daily basis, Larry and his colleagues work to battle human trafficking, illegal property seizures, forced prostitution, and other systematic systems of abuse. At any point there are 27 million slaves in bondage in the world today....

I guess I've known that abuse occurs all over the world and in ways I couldn't imagine. I can remember speaking with a student at Eastern Kentucky University years ago who had survived the Rwandan genocide--losing her mother to a machete attack--and hearing her speak of the amazingly overlooked luxury of personal safety that Americans enjoy while most of the world doesn't. She described being present during gun battles and taking shelter while bullets whizzed around her.

But what stood out to me last night was Larry's definition of injustice as an abuse of power--of using position and influence to rob and harm others rather than to protect and nurture. He quoted a World Bank statement that the biggest threat to most individuals living in poverty is abuse at the hands of the local police--being extorted or wrongly imprisoned at the whim of men who abuse power given to protect and serve.

All of this abuse and injustice can be overwhelming, but as we considered what we--as the light of the world--could possibly do in response to this huge need, Larry left us with two questions that Jesus asked of the Twelve when faced with the daunting task of feeding the 5000+ men and women who had come to hear Jesus speak:

1. What do you have?
2. Will you give it to me?

Jesus could have fed the 5000 with manna--he'd fed more than that in the desert--but he used the lunch of a little boy and gave him and the Twelve the privilege of being part of the solution to the hungry masses' needs.

The only hope the world has is if we, individual members of the church, are willing to give the little we have back to Jesus to use in this way. Jesus did said, "You give them something to eat..."