80% (This Thanksgiving Holiday)

Thanksgiving is tomorrow.  I am already envisioning the turkey, the dressing, all the wonderful food that I am going to enjoy.  The only damper on this much anticipated holiday is the constant reminder in the back of my mind that while I eat each bite of this Thanksgiving feast, there are those around the world who will be eating nothing.  Not one bite all day.  And maybe not the day after that either. 

Did you know that more than 80% of the earth's population survives on less than $10 a day?  My friends often tease me about saying this when we head to Starbucks or the movie theater and spend a ton of money on pointless things like a caramel mocha or a movie ticket.  I say guiltily, "Here we are spending twenty bucks on nothing, when most of the world survives on less than $10 a day."

It may seem pessimistic, but I want to keep reminding everyone around me, including myself, that we are so privileged.  Everything I have is a gift.  The bottle of water sitting eight inches away from me is a privilege.  The blanket wrapped around my shoulders right now is a privilege.  My family is downstairs, laughing and watching The Biggest Loser together.  They are a huge blessing.  I am blessed with so much that the rest of the world doesn't have.

First of all, I need to remember to not be ungrateful for the things that I have, and that can be such a difficult thing.  When things go wrong, when I don't like something, my first instinct is to push it away, to complain.  But I need to be more grateful for things, because there are so many out there who long for the things that I don't want.

Second, I need to be careful not to waste, not to fritter my money away on too many pointless things, not to 'not care' about the people who truly need money out there.  I don't want to be one of the people I wrote about in my song "Drink the Coffee," where I wrote, "We never stop and think about the hungry.  We never stop and think about the broken.  We just sit around and laugh, and we waste a few earned bucks, while the children fade away... we drink our coffee while Jesus cries."  I don't want to be like that.  I need to have better understanding about the world around me, and have an awareness about everything I am doing.  After all, I am an example of Christ.

Lastly, I need to give more.  That is fairly self-explanatory.  There are people who have nothing all over the world, even in the town in which I live.  These people are hungry.  That shirt that I never wear because I don't like its color... there are people who would love to have something that nice to wear.  Those old shoes that I have just because I don't feel like throwing them out quite yet... millions of children don't even have any shoes at all.

This holiday season has already, and will have, both sad and sweet times for me.  As I continue to grow and slowly transform myself to be a tiny mold of Christ, I need to constantly remember the children out there who have nothing.  I cannot forget them.  I refuse to blend back in to how I was before.  I am being changed by Christ's compassion for His children, and I want my heart to continue to change.