Feast or Famine

[An abbreviated version of this article appears in The Bridge, Winter 2006.]
I sit on the grass watching others eat a sumptuous meal while I have four ounces of soup and a cup of water that smacks of dirt. I am part of the 60% of the human population that earns under $912 per year. The group to my left is middle class; they earn between $912 and $9211 per year. They are about 25% of the population of our planet. Those eating the good meal, the ones making $9212 per year or more, are the upper class in our global economy, the upper 15% of humanity.

This is "Feast or Famine" at the 2006 Word Mission Workshop, held this year in Lubbock, Texas. Earlier, I randomly drew a wrist band to admit me to the cafeteria. The color purple assigned me to the poverty-stricken majority during the hunger awareness experience. The experience is a reality check on the stare of our world: inequitable distribution of wealth, malnutrition, ignorance and greed. Sitting on the grass I can feel my head burning in the West Texas sun. I resist the urge to run into the air conditioning. I need the experience of hunger and sun to remind me of those whom I so easily ignore.

I hear several responses to the global understanding event. One student tells about his own homelessness as a young man and how he lived on soup kitchen rations for several months.

Some weep. My friend who had drawn a blue wristband feels guilty as he eats his three course lunch. If he tries to give us food, actors playing security guards will intervene: "Giving food to beggars only encourages begging!"

Others commit to do something. One student gathers his friends and buys two packs of food from a local benevolent ministry; one pack for a local soup kitchen and the other so they can host a similar event on their campus.

Some blow it off. In reality, almost everyone here is part of the 15 percent. They will live most of their lives trying to distance themselves from the poor.

My own response is different. I wonder who will lead the mass of students now riled up to fight injustice. Who in this crowd will be the prophetic voice leading forth to a new dawn? Having several hundred students aware of social injustice is very different from having several hundred students led to do something to impact those injustices.

"God, raise up leaders," I pray silently. As soon as I pray it, I turn and see that God is already at work raising leaders: I see Bob Logsdon not too far away from me. He and I studied together at Harding University Graduate School of Religion.

Bob is here with some of the high school students from his inner-city work in Tulsa, Okla. I wonder if in the real world any of them are far enough in poverty to be in the lowest level of the "Feast or Famine." How ironic that these inner-city youth are participating in an experience intended to make us aware of life's disproportional distribution of wealth.

Earlier I had asked Bob about his ministry. He pointed to a photo of a man who had come to his ministry as an addict. Now that man runs a house for recovering addicts. Bob had been a witness to the transforming power of God in the life of one man, and now Bob gets to witness as God transforms others through that re-made man.

I sit and get sunburned, my heart aching for those suffering from a global economy that has put me on the top of the heap. As I sip my unfiltered water, I rejoice that in the midst of this reenactment of inequity I am near a man confronting real-life inequality. He is igniting a quiet revolution of spiritual re-birth.

Such is the power of transformational leadership.