Burden for the Suffering

Around the world, many people are suffering. Often, we who live in comfort forget what it means to be in pain. We who eat full meals, have clothes to eat, and a loving and stable family environment, forget those who are hungry, who are destitute, and naked, and living in loveless and abusive situations.

Matthew 25 describes a scene at the end of days where many good, normal, Christians who profess the name of Jesus and call Him, "Lord", will end up suffering God's judgment because they neglected the suffering.

Who are the people at risk today? CNN.com often highlights their situations. Here are some descriptions of suffering in the world today that I have read recently.

1) Slaves. "Human trafficking" is another word for slavery. What did merchants do to people such as many Africans? Traffic them on ships against their will. Many are slaves today. Are we crying out to God to deliver them? Are we going to laud the graves of abolitionists while not speaking out the greedy moneymakers who prey upon the helpless? God forbid.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Many are not  only physically exploited, but sexually exploited. And many of them are children, against whom are done horrific deeds.


2) Children. Street children. Malnourished children. Starving children. Slave children. Beaten children. Abused Children. Children forced to work, to beg. Children working dangerous machinery in factories. Children who are disfigured, held captive against their will. Children without love and care in their lives, who end up in the wrong company and become criminals. Child soldiers. Child criminals. Young children forced into marriage. Orphans, living in mental institutions, abused, maltreated, unwanted. Children with impairments. Children killed by the ruthless and greedy. The list goes on.

3) Girls. Young girls, sold to older men as wife-slaves. Young girls, enslaved as prostitutes, helpless, violated. Young girls, raped and beaten and oppressed, given and bought and sold. Exploited, helpless little girls. Girls who know no other life than that of pain, rejection, instability.

4) Refugees. People without a home, without income, without property, fed with the barest of foods, without clean water. People who do not have the simplest sanitary needs met. People who die, simply for want of knowledge, living in ignorance and unnecessary suffering.

My friends, this is happening all around the world. God sees, God knows, and God cares. The thing is, can we identify ourselves with His sorrow? Let us not speak of social activism or work. Can we even tarry with Him one hour? Can we live as Christ, who was a man for others, who sacrificed all that was entitled to Him to die on the cross? What are we willing to sacrifice if we cannot even accommodate others, when we cannot even deny ourselves one simply want or pleasure.

We cannot accomplish a single thing unless we have learned to die to ourselves, our visions, our perception, our pleasure. We must be filled with the Spirit of God so that we can see as He sees and feel as He feels, because the suffering of man may be shielded from our view and thus easily forgotten, but not from the view of God. And we know that though we may not have direct "work" to do, we can only but do what work from which all works must derive - fall on our knees before God, pleading, crying out with holy desperation, groaning with the burden of such painful knowledge, pouring ourselves out in prayer out for the lost, dying, suffering, enslaved, oppressed before the face of the God-who-sees. 

Prayer is not simply "a thing in itself", an esoteric action to complete our spirituality. Intercession is for real, pressing, need.