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A Mission That's Bigger Than My Apathy

Apathy. An enemy that relentlessly plagues us all. It tells us to settle, that we can do no great things, that we can’t make a difference.

It tells us that there is nothing that we can do about the pain that burdens this planet. It says there is nothing you can do about the starving children in Africa. There’s nothing you can offer the trafficked girl in India; your voice isn’t loud enough to advocate for the voiceless.

Apathy says you can’t, so you shouldn’t even try. It has a way of sucking the passion straight out of your bones.

That starving child, well he is continents away, how are you to care for him? The girl who is raped multiple times a day, well that is sad, but what are you supposed to do about it?

It’s all tragedy, but because it’s not happening right in front of us, we choose to look the other way.

But it is happening in front of you. Thanks to the modern era, we know all too much about the tragedy around the world. It’s in the news, in the books and all over the Internet.

It’s just like William Wilberforce said, “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”

So if we all know, why aren’t we doing anything about it?

The other day, a skinny, dirty child came up to me begging for my juice. He was half-clothed and wielding a feather duster, dusting cars to earn a couple of cents to buy food. I wanted my juice, so I settled with giving him a high five and walking away.

I justified it by saying that he was his mother’s responsibility, not mine. If he really needed the juice, I am sure that someone else would give it to him. I wouldn’t make any difference.

In that moment, I am ashamed to say that my apathy won out.

The truth is that it would have made a difference, to him and to God. I can’t feed all the beggar children in the world, but I could have fed him.

And that counts for something.

We can do something about it, all of it. It is the belief that we can’t that allows things like that to happen as much as they do.