So How Do I Serve?

*Make sure to notice the footnotes on this one.

The purpose of most of my writing is to hopefully incite a healthy perspective shift in those that have never known or have lost sight of our calling (all of us) to serve humanity. Americans largely live in an extremely uncultured bubble of comfortable, self indulgent mediocrity. I don’t say that to be judgmental or abrasive; only to illustrate a painful truth that is exemplified in most of American suburbia. People get so wrapped up in “stuff” and everyday petty drama that they forget there is a whole world of poverty stricken outcasts out there that need their help. And regardless of what religion you subscribe to, if you do in fact believe in a God, most every religion speaks of their God being with and favoring the poor, oppressed and abused. And as a Christian, I certainly know that’s where my God likes to spend His time (and probably His money too).

So let’s just assume that you’ve read some of my previous postings and maybe even a few great books like “Irresistible Revolution” and you now feel compelled to serve, but you have no idea how to do so effectively. Well you are certainly not alone. There are millions of people out there that feel convicted and consequently called to serve but they just feel trapped in their own lives. They think “I am just a house mom or dad, so how do I help some poor kid in Africa get out of a bad situation and into a new life? What does that even look like? How do I help with my limited finances?” And those are perfectly relevant questions.

I want to start this by reiterating the fact that some people are called to serve those in other countries, and some are called to be teachers, pastors, life coaches, mechanics, parents, presidents, architects, and policemen in their own country, community or household. I don’t ever want to imply that you have to serve in Africa just to live up to God’s standards of serving. We all have different gifts and callings and each is just as relevant and significant as another. Some people may be called to raise up a family of world changers. If that’s your calling, you have a big job cut out for you. You now have the duty of sensitizing your children and giving them perspective which means your knowledge of the world, of the poor, and of other world leaders must be extensive and comprehensive. You must take them to the pit of poverty and teach them how to overcome it. You must teach them to be teachers. Their heads need to be pumped full of the teachings of Gandhi, Bono, Jesus, Mandela, Muhammad Yunus, and many others. (I’d suggest the principles of Bushido as well.) This is a huge, and very honorable, commitment; one that will last your whole life (literally).

I’ve spent many years working on all different sides of humanitarianism and philanthropy, and I’d be lying if I told you that we really need anything more than a big bank account with unlimited funds. (footnote 1) Rather than try and generalize here, I’m just going to use our NGO as an example in order to illustrate what I’m trying to say. We’ve been here for two years, listening and learning. We know who we are serving and what they need because we’ve been here listening to them, not imposing our American ideals into their culture. We have a strategic plan and a great crew. We are ready to make it happen. But what is our biggest road block? Funding, or rather the lack thereof. But it’s difficult to get funding on the front end of a project like this. No one believes you can do it. And we have no real track record, yet. So there are three primary ways to go about this, 1) fund raising, 2) advocacy – meaning educating and sensitizing, 3) creating our own income generation projects that help fund the organization as well as provide income to the women we serve. (Number 3 is the primary focus at KEZA.) But you really only have the ability to help with two of those. So let’s break it down practically.

1) Fund Raising – This can be done many, many different ways. You can write a check out of your own pocket, you can encourage others to do the same, and you can help to create actual fund raising events where lots of people come together to give. However, we have found that the single most effective form of fund raising is the “home fundraiser”. This is where you do your homework about whatever group of people you’d like to serve, you put together a little event at your home, you invite 10-20 of your closest friends, you serve some coffee and deserts, you give a presentation, you have a discussion and you ask for funds. Then you create an ongoing community of supporters that gather once a month or so to learn about what is going on with their project and they give money to it, constantly keeping track of where the money is going. This process is extremely effective. Instead of giving $100, do a home fund raiser that costs you $100 to host, get 10 others to give $100, and turn your $100 into $1,000. And you also get to create a cool community for like minded friends. And there's ubuntu again...

2) Advocacy – Ok this one is just a trick. Any time an organization says they need advocacy, what they are really saying is that they need you to tell everyone about their organization so they will give money to it (or act in some way). What else do you really need advocacy for? We are not out to teach people about catastrophic events for our health, or theirs. It’s in hopes that they will do something to stop it from continuing, and as most of them are not going to actually fly across the world to stop it. It’s most likely that they will just write a check. So that’s really what advocacy is about, (outside of the need for lobbying, which is definitely a relevant and important task).

So if you are wondering how you can help to end extreme poverty, fight HIV/AIDS, get orphans into homes, provide schooling for poor kids, or whatever it is you feel called to do, there are some easy and practical ways to doing so. Just remember that if you do anything, let it be the start, not an ending. Don’t give once and mark it off your list. Give consistently. Take $100 and turn it into $1,000 for your favorite charity. Host “home fund raisers”. Don’t do it once. Do it 12 times a year if you can. Be consistent. Teach your children the importance of giving, serving the poor, and building community. Encourage your church to give more of its income to missions and less to building the new coffee shop in the lobby. (footnote 2) Give 10% (or more) of your income to the poor. Not your church, the poor. Get creative. Don’t let your 10% tithe to the church be a cop-out. If you feel compelled or called to give money to the church, do it, but I encourage you to take the time to see how you might invest in the poor with 10% (maybe in addition to your tithe) of your income. Tell everyone you know about the community you’ve adopted. Be their spokesperson. Plaster your house with materials about them so everyone knows what you are about. Don’t be a weekend warrior. In the spirit of the Quakers (known for their simplicity and excellent oatmeal), “let your life speak”.

There are tons of great things you can do. I can’t give you a master list. I’m not the guru on effective giving. However, I will tell you to get creative. Don’t make giving and serving something you do on Sundays or once a month with a check. Make it your focus. For those of you that ask yourself “What would Jesus do?”, rather ask yourself “what DID Jesus do?” He lived with the poor. He made it His life, to the death. That’s who He was, not what He did.

So who are you? What are you about? The single biggest thing you can do to serve the poor, anywhere in the world, is to first convince yourself that it shouldn’t just be an item on your To-Do List for the day; it should be your life, in all that you do. It should be who you are, not what you do. You shouldn’t have to explain it to your friends; your life should be speaking it for you. Once you commit yourself to a group of people you are going to serve, you’ll figure out how to do it. Just like when you really want that hazelnut latte from the coffee store that is WAY out of the way from where you are going today. I bet you’ll figure out how to make it work. We all do exactly what we want to do. So what’s on your list today?

1 I want to make sure I say this. I believe that ANY new organization doing humanitarian work needs to be just barely above the flat broke line for their first year or two. It makes you streamlined. It makes you strategic. It makes you calculated. It weeds out the ones in your organization that may be in it for the wrong reasons. It refines you. If you are just starting out and you get a million dollars to work with, invest $900,000 and use the remaining $100,000 to do your first year of work. Trust me on this. This will have a major effect on your level of effectiveness and the sustainability of your project. It’s important to be a little poor when you are helping the extremely poor. Do this for a year and you’ll agree with what I’m saying. (And yes, we stumbled upon this little factoid, it wasn’t something we set out to do.)

2 Yeah I know it attracts the kiddos, but let’s keep some perspective on what would really impact their lives and challenge them to be better servants. Instead use that coffee shop budget to do weekly trips to visit and serve the poor in your community. Kids dig that too. Or save up for a great missions trip. Create an income generating activity for the poor. Coffee shops are easy. Get creative.

She Even Has A Name

I’ve been doing humanitarian work for as long as I can remember. I recall quite vividly seeing the music video for “We are the World” back in 1985. I was only 7 years old. I’ve always been a music enthusiast, even at that age, and I was irrevocably moved by what I saw in that video. Here were all of the people I admired, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Bob Geldof, etc, fighting for people on the other side of the world. It was my first exposure to “Africans”. These little Ethiopian children (this was during the famine in Ethiopia) were dying of hunger. These kids were just like me; just like my friends. And I wondered why it was only these famous musicians that were fighting for them. Why wasn’t everyone up in arms about this? If this were happening in my classroom…well it simply wouldn’t. It couldn’t. Not in America. But it IS happening, even in America.

Why is it always “us” and “them”? Most people would say they believe in justice and equality, but few actually practice it, or even realize it’s something they have anything to do with. What would you do if your daughter, niece, or cousin was being sexually abused and you found out about it? I would imagine you’d do just about anything, even things you never dreamed you were capable of, just to stop this atrocity from happening. What if it was a little girl in your church or school? She was having her innocence stripped from her and nothing was being done about it. There would be an outrage, right? What if it was a little girl that lived in the ghetto near your city? And what if it was a little African girl? Really think about it. Where is your mind going? Do you feel yourself detaching? Can you start to feel your mind removing yourself from the responsibility of helping this innocent child? Now ask yourself how far removed from you she has to be for you to not care anymore? My guess is that once she’s removed from your immediate sphere of influence, she’s not your problem anymore. She becomes a “them”.

The problem is that people, Americans in particular, don’t even want to know the truth of what surrounds them. The term “ignorance is bliss” is no joke. We’ve become quite skilled at removing ourselves from the responsibility of loving our neighbors as ourselves. We become consumed by our everyday “needs”, which in most cases are not needs at all; they are simply worldly desires. If I had a picture of a little blond haired, blue eyed girl from your church and said she was being beaten, you would be angered. You’d want to stop it. You’d even feel responsible for stopping it simply because you now have knowledge of it. But if I hold up a picture of a little 7 year old girl from Rwanda that has been sold into prostitution in order to provide food for her AIDS infected mother and three sickly siblings, you’d likely cringe a little and say something like, “that’s just horrible and I can’t believe that is happening”. And you’d be correct because you really CAN’T believe its happening. It’s not even reality for you. If we really believed African’s are equal to Americans, the every day atrocities of Africa would cease. But we don’t. We see “us” and Africans, Iraqis, Indians, Asians, bums, poor people, or whatever makes it easy for us to separate “us” from “them”. We must detach in order to continue our lives of mere existence. Otherwise we become responsible for caring, for doing something, and no one wants that.

But we are all human. That includes all the people that the US is currently slaughtering in Iraq every day, all in the name of peace. I could tell you stories about little Africans, little Iraqis, and little kids in the streets of Nashville, New York and LA, but you’ve heard them already. What I’m asking is that you take any one of those stories and imagine you love that person. Don’t allow yourself to detach. Don’t dehumanize them. Don’t make that person a “them”. People often refuse to watch movies like Hotel Rwanda (not that it was entirely accurate), Beyond Rangoon, Tears of the Sun, and so on because they don’t want to know the horrors that go on in this world. They don’t want to believe that people are actually suffering through these atrocities or that they are really even people at all. They don’t want that responsibility. After all, ignorance is bliss, right?

If you consider yourself to be a caring, compassionate person that is searching for a way to help others; I would encourage you first to address the issue of “us and them”. People are always trying to figure out what “issue” they are going to get involved with or fight for. Don’t choose an issue. Choose people. What people are you going to fall in love with? What people will you choose to believe are just the same as you? They could be right down the street or in the shanty towns of Africa. This is not about charity. It’s about justice. And it’s about love. You love your family too much to let them suffer through injustice. What will it take for you love others in the same way? We are all human; children of God. ALL of us. Not just Americans. Not just the affluent. Your kid and the kid in Africa have the same value in God’s eyes. What about yours? This is a big test and few people ever really get it. When you believe that the little African girl is your own, and you fall in love with her as your own, the “issues” will present themselves. When you love someone, you begin to understand them and their needs. That’s when the “issues” will present themselves. You’ll know what to do.

When we talk about HIV, poverty, corruption and all of the other “African” issues, people very quickly think, “those are huge problems”, “we will never actually fix those issues”, “there is nothing I can do to stop HIV”, or any other number of hopeless proclamations. You can find a ton of great reasons to remove yourself from any responsibility in the situation. Or you may think that Bono and Bill Gates are already on it, so no worries; everything’s going to be ok. And that’s just the kind of thinking that are making all of those doubts become a reality. Imagine if all of us believed that we could make a difference, and that we could do it by simply realizing that it’s not us and them. We are together. The next time you see a picture of a starving little African child, or a bum on the street, spend some time imagining that person as your own daughter, sister, or friend. And know that they are. Believe it. We must first change the way our minds think before we can expect to change the world. But it’s happening every day. You just have to decide if you’re going to be part of the problem or part of the solution. There is no in-between. There is no in-between.

The poor, no matter what natinality, are not inanimate objects. Remember, she’s your daughter, your niece, your neighbor. She’s not an “African”. She’s not a statistic. She’s not a picture on the Compassion International commercial. She’s a little innocent girl. She even has a name.

Serve to Lead

I love movies. I can reach back in my Rolodex of watched movies and pull out a quote or an example for just about any situation at any given moment. Suffice it to say, I’ve seen a lot of them. Movies can be powerful. There’s the scenery, the captivating music that lures you into one emotion and on to the next, the interaction with people; everything you need to make a powerful point or tell a beautiful story. Movies have greatly impacted my life over the years and I believe God speaks to me through them. Hey, if he can speak through a donkey to Balaam in the bible, he can speak through a good flick.

So I watched “The Last Samurai” again last night. It was probably the 4^th time I’d seen it, but for some reason it really impacted me on another level this time. Whether or not you like Tom Cruise or not is irrelevant. The movie is a masterpiece on many levels. I could go on an on, but I’ll get to the point. There is much talk of the “way of the Samurai”, or “Bushido” which is a philosophy that describes the way a Samurai is commanded to live. It’s not a suggestion; it’s a way of life. You are either a Samurai or you are not. It’s not a race or religion. It’s a belief system that is apparent in every action of those that follow the philosophy; the Samurai. For instance, the Samurai do not believe in promises. They believe that if you have said something, promise or not, you are then bound by what you said. There are 7 virtues represented in Bushido. They are:

Chu – Duty and Loyalty
Gi – Justice and Morality
Makoto – Complete Sincerity
Rei – Polite Courtesy
Jin – Compassion
Yu – Heroic Courage
Meiyo – Honor

If you’d like to learn more about Bushido, I’d suggest checking out Wikipedia.

Could you imagine if everyone lived by this philosophy? I think about this in comparison to Africa. Do to colonialism, western influences and oppression for so many decades, there is a society of people that think primarily of themselves and their own survival. There is no talk of honor, respect, or serving others. Typically, when Africans think of leaders, they think of dictators, not true leaders. That’s what they’ve witnessed over the years. But the Samurai represent true loyalty, true respect, and true servanthood. The word Samurai in fact means “to serve”. How about that? The fiercest warriors in our history call themselves servants. That’s powerful.

When I think of William Wallace, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Bono, or Jesus (I think they all would have enjoyed each other’s company), I see servants; people that would give their life (or did) for what they believe in, for others. William Wallace gave his life for his people, as did many other great leaders. Bono spends the majority of his life serving the poor. Jesus gave his life on the cross between two thieves, after spending his life living with the poor. These guys are all servants. They weren’t people that just went around leaving a trail of dead bodies and wounded souls in their wake. They fought (in different ways) for their people and to protect what they believed to be sacred. There is honor in that.

I believe the best leaders are so because they are the best servants. Their first thoughts are how to serve others, not how to get more for themselves. They would give up everything just to feed another hungry person. That’s leadership. What will people remember about you when you are dead and gone? Will they remember someone that served others or themselves? Will they remember a leader, a follower or a dictator? If there’s one thing I pray I can teach others, it’s to be a servant. I would consider my life to be a success if there was nothing listed on my tombstone other than “Jared N Miller, Servant”.