Darfur, Our Children, and Matt 25

I am just beginning to educate myself regarding the on-going refugee and genocide crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.

As well as learning about the current crisis, I am helping lead a parenting class at our church. In our parenting class, we discussed how would you want your children to answer the question, "My parents taught me ___________________". My wife and I agreed, we desire our kids to answer that question, "My parents taught me to be compassionate toward the poor". Even deeper than that my desire would be that the care for the poor would be central to our family's worship of Jesus.

Jesus said to the righteous in His parable of the sheep and the goats, "When I was naked, you clothed Me. When I was hungry, you gave me food. When I was thirsty, you gave me drink."

So I have decided to take the following steps:
1. My wife and I are going to pre-screen, "Hotel Rwanda" tonight and see if it is a good video for my older children to watch.
2. I have ordered a copy of this video from "Human Rights Watch"
3. We will feed Jesus and clothe His nakeness by giving to World Vision here.
4. We will begin a new goal:

The Double Tithe Goal
I am going to challenge people to begin giving regularly above and beyond their normal giving to the church to give specifically to the poor and to development. As families, the goal is to live as simply as possible, before our children, and give all this extra savings to charity. What a beautiful way to make compassion a daily part of our worship life.

The situation in Darfur as far as I can tell is that the region is living under an often breached peace plan. The problem is that the region needs more African troops. To support the call by Human Rights Watch and others for more African troops in the Darfur region go here. Passion of the Present suggests that this is the best way to spend our dollars to help the stop the on-going genocide in Dafur. Students at Harvard in April had an Adopt a Peacekeeper Campaign using the above Genocide Intervetion Fund.

To help refugees with immediate needs go to World Vision.

God Bless,
brad