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Crying for the Hurting

My heart hurts for the ills of Africa

• Walking with God // Prayer for the hurting
• Adam R. Cole // August 2, 2009

Poverty is going empty with no hope for the future. Poverty is watching your mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters die in pain and in sorrow just because they couldn't get something to eat. Poverty is watching your own children and grandchildren die in your arms but there is nothing you can do. Poverty is suffering from HIV/AIDS and dying a shameful death but nobody seems to care. Poverty is when you dream of bread and fish you never see in the day light. ---a woman in Africa

It remains a place of every day peril. One infused with the worst vices the spew from our earth, a cauldron of evil spurned on by human greed, economics, environment, war, and disease.

While poverty is epidemic the world over, the culture and the effects of poverty are no more apparent than in Africa, where death to AIDS or starvation seems inevitable.

Here, as the heat protrudes into every facet of life, where mosquitoes carry deadly disease, where village tribal man rule with a corrupt arts, the people are at the mercy of the world in which they are a part of.

Every day here seems to be a matter of survival; death is constant. People grow up disassociated with loved ones that did not survive. Everyone has lost someone…and those that move on know they could be next at anytime.

It’s hard to believe, it’s almost painstaking to even comprehend, how one country like America could seem to have it all while another, an entire continent have you, mires in nothingness.

We all must give at least a seconds worth of thought on this disparity: How did we get here? How did we get to a point where some can be in absolute gain while others are in absolute need?

Like everything, it began with sin, it began with the fracturing of the world, first through Adam and then through those that tried to create a tower to heaven. God scattered the world and then flooded the world and even when He chose Noah to carry on generations of righteous people, But Noah’s descendents went their ways as well.

And those that went astray populated this earth, choosing to build altars to the unknown gods instead of to the living God.

Africa—as a continent—and places like the dehumanized existences that pervades there, is neither a direct cause not the result of this sin but the seeds of sin have indeed been sown here and are a main reason why poverty creates a trap that no one in it can escape from.

Men’s hearts here long for power, long for riches, long to rule over others. Such sin causes continual conflict and for ruling governors to think only of themselves and not their constituents. It causes the outside world, which is aware of such a struggle going on here, to look the other way.

Poverty begets poverty begets poverty. When survival is the only way, one can only think of getting the next meal, much less how to build toward a future.