“…Jesus went into a village. A woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat down at the Lord’s feet and kept listening to what he was saying. But Martha was worrying about all the things she had to do, so she came to him and asked, “Lord, you do care that my sister has left me to do the work all by myself, don’t you? Then tell her to help me.”

Luke 10:38-41

Mardi and I returned last week from a trip to the Masoyi area of South Africa, near the northeastern border with Mozambique. While on the ground, we were stunned and heartbroken by the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the rural communities. In places like this all over Africa the statistics of the infected, orphaned, and dying quickly overwhelm your ability to process them—70% of pregnant women HIV positive, over 30% of the community HIV positive, households led by teenagers, a new orphan to care for nearly every day. And this is South Africa—relatively first-world, the rainbow nation considered the ‘poster child’ for democracy, a beacon of hope and promise to other third-world African countries.

In Masoyi, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is ravaging communities and lives with no endpoint in sight. While there two weeks ago, I began to realize that it is not enough for me to approach the Biblical mandate to ‘take care of widows and orphans in their suffering’ (James 1:27) in a clinical and detached way. My natural inclinations—to identify problems, assess solutions, and execute plans to implement them—are simply inadequate here. The need is too great.

It’s not that there are not real solutions and lots of hard work to be done—there is. It’s just that planning, problem-solving, and productivity are not enough. If we are to be like Christ and follow him, our hearts must be broken and we must care—our actions must begin and end with love and relationship. It’s got to be personal

To God, it’s deeply personal. And until it becomes personal to us, the people dying needlessly in places like Masoyi all over the world because of the cycle of violence, poverty, and preventable diseases will continue to be abstract statistics, and not people to us.

I realized in Masoyi that God loves, really loves the broken, orphaned, and dying in a way that I do not. I wanted to fix their problems and restore wholeness to the community—God wants that also, but more than that, he wants them to know his love. Righteousness and justice are the foundations of his throne, but love is its fruit (Ps 89:14).

Love. This is why followers of Christ order their lives as though they are homeless (Matt 8:20), care for orphans and widows, and work to clean the ‘inside of the cup’ (Matt 23:26) by living an intentional and disciplined life (1 Tim 4:8).

Not simply ‘because it’s the right thing to do’, or because you have ‘been given a heart for social justice’. That’s nonsense. There are over 2,000 separate instances in Scripture where the Lord reveals his compassion for the poor and the helpless—let us not deliberately dull our spiritual senses any longer by waiting until we feel ‘called’ to social justice issues before we act. No, we do these things because of love, and because the Lord has already spoken. Go. Do. Love. Sacrifice.

When you speak to someone dying of AIDS, laying in a corner of a dark room on a dirty pallet in the middle of nowhere, the need to ‘do the right thing’ fades away and that person and their story simply becomes deeply, deeply personal to you. Just as it is to God.

What is your story? Are you like Martha, eager to do the right thing, tending to be task-focused, and slavishly working away as hard as you can in the kitchen while the Lord sits in the living room talking with others? Or are you like Mary, sitting at the Lord’s feet whenever you have the chance, spending time with him in order to learn to live more like him, simply because you love him?

Hear the Lord, and find peace: “Martha, Martha! You worry and fuss about a lot of things. But there’s only one thing you need. Mary has chosen what is better, and it is not to be taken away from her (Luke 10:42).”

Let us thank the Lord if we are gifted with the ability to see problems and devise and implement solutions to fix them. It is a gift, and one we will be held accountable by the Lord for our stewardship of. But let us deliberately resist the natural tendency to make the gift the purpose of our existence. Let us hear the Lord calling us to love and relationship as the foundation and starting and ending point of all that we do.

For Further Action: Spend some time this week in prayer and quiet meditation before the Lord. You might want to rise early in the morning, or go away by yourself on the weekend to be alone. Meditate on the narrative of Luke 10:38-42, and reflect on which you tend more towards—working and productivity, or love and relationship. Humbly invite the Lord to reveal to you where you might become more like him, and to come and change you by his grace. Consider then what deliberate and intentional steps you can take in order to place yourself before the Lord to be further changed by his grace in this area.

Resource of the Week: The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in our Lifetime, by Jeffrey Sachs, with a foreword by Bono. An excellent book, providing intelligent and thoughtful background on poverty around the world by one of the world’s eminent economists. His solutions to global poverty are perhaps a bit superficial, as they deal only with the material and ignore entirely the spiritual, but it is certainly a comprehensive and compassionate book.