Free Exodus From Hunger by David Beckmann Page A

suffering. We cannot explain why a good God lets one child die, let alone why tens of thousands of children continue to die needlessly every day. But we believe that God shares in human suffering and brings good out of evil. So we reach out to poor families and pray for their rescue. We pray for progress against poverty with the intensity of a mother who asks God to rescue her own child from a life-saving disease, and people of faith know that God answers prayers in a wonderful way.
    Confessing that God is in the movement to end hunger and poverty does not mean that further progress is automatic. The feasibility of ending hunger has been widely recognized for decades. At the World Food Conference of 1973, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that by the year 2000, no child in the world would go to bed hungry. Many reports and conferences since have repeated the claim that we can end hunger, if only we can muster the political will to do it.
    I have walked the halls of Congress for hungry people for many years, and there is always something else—some politically important, overriding issue—that politicians feel must take precedence. When the Cold War ended at the beginning of the 1990s, the United States could have redirected more of the massive resources we had spent on the Cold War to overcome hunger and poverty in our country and worldwide. But our nation instead decided not to cut military spending much. In the first decade of this century, a booming economy again gave us additional resources, but we spent them on big tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    According to the Bible, God is usually frustrated by the way people and nations behave. People who work for God’s purposes in the world must often wait—and sometimes suffer and die for the Lord. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle.” 2
    Yet God’s presence in the movement to overcome hunger and poverty raises our hopes. Some optimism is justified by the experience of recent decades and analysis of what is feasible, and faith in God adds a religious dimension of hope. We believe God has benevolent intentions for humanity and will, in the end, bring us to the day when there will be “hunger no more” (Isaiah 49:10; Revelation 7:16). Through the ups and downs of history, those of us who believe God raised Jesus from the dead are always looking for ways God will bring good out of evil, and we are working to seize those opportunities. 3
    Jim McDonald, my closest colleague at Bread for the World, said it this way in a sermon to his home congregation:
    Even when things seem to be going wrong, when it seems like it’s the scoundrels and the scalawags that are in charge, it’s good to be reminded that God has other plans, bigger plans, better plans; and God has purposes in mind for this world that even a calamity, whatever its size, whatever its genesis, can’t put an end to. 4
     
    Based on what the Bible says about people in need, doing our part to overcome hunger and poverty is crucial to religious integrity. We can go to church and sing great hymns, but if we don’t help people in need, this is made-up religion rather than connection to the real God. We can read spiritual books and pursue a wholesome lifestyle, but if we don’t help people in need, our faith remains self-centered.
    For people who know and love the Lord, awareness of God’s presence in the movement to overcome hunger and poverty adds a dimension of faith that most churchgoers miss. We are connected to God through Jesus Christ, and then see our loving God at work in history. The life of faith becomes exciting and historic, bigger than our private lives. Reading the morning news becomes an extension of our morning prayers. Photos of famine on television are engaging rather than depressing. Our involvement in politics becomes an adventure of faith.
    We can share Christian faith in God’s love by